Paranorman

I know it's been a while since I posted an actual review and not a list, so I thought to make up for it, I'd talk about a movie that really surprised me. That movie (in case you couldn't tell by the title at the top) is Paranorman, a stop motion animated movie about an 11 year old kid that can speak to the dead (a la The Sixth Sense) and has to use his gift to save his town from a curse. The one thing that I have to stress about this movie is that if you are a parent, I would strongly advise you to think twice before you take smaller children to see this movie. Apart from having some frightening sequences not normally seen in animated movies, there are several other things not commonly seen in animated movies such as sexual innuendos, swearing, a reference to the f word, and a twist in which a character turns out to be gay. Now, having said all that, Paranorman was actually really good and I enjoyed the heck out of it. This was one of those situations where I went to go see it with a friend, we were the only ones in the theater within our age group, and we were laughing harder than the little kids were. Part of it was because of the few things that I had mentioned before, and part of it was also due to the fact that the humor was very much aimed at us. Some of the jokes (in fact I'd be willing to bet the majority) were aimed at us, and went right over the kid's heads. Not to mention the stop motion animation was absolutely top notch, reminding me why I have always found it to be so friggin cool. So yeah, if you're the parent of a small children, pass on this, they weren't the target market. If you're a teenager and up, you might enjoy this more than you expect.

Final Grade: A