Chris But­ler on Para­Nor­man: ​‘We want­ed it to feel like a rollercoaster’

Ten years ago, Lai­ka Stu­dios cement­ed their sta­tus as stop-motion ani­ma­tion pio­neers with their sec­ond fea­ture, Para­Nor­man. A fam­i­ly hor­ror-com­e­dy about a young out­cast who can com­mune with ghosts and has to stop a curse con­nect­ed to his sleepy Mass­a­chu­setts town’s dis­turb­ing witch tri­al past, the film was one of 2012’s finest, ani­mat­ed or oth­er­wise. Ambi­tious­ly tac­tile and askew in its dis­tinc­tive ani­ma­tion and designs, unique­ly mature in its storytelling.

Ahead of a new 4K anniver­sary the­atri­cal re-release, co-direc­tor Chris But­ler gra­cious­ly hopped onto Zoom to dis­cuss the unfin­ished pitch that got him the green­light, the chal­lenges of metaphor­i­cal­ly bal­anc­ing tone and lit­er­al­ly bal­anc­ing pup­pets, and the impor­tant queer mile­stone of one Mitch Downe.

LWLies: What was your first mem­o­ry of pitch­ing ParaNorman?

Chris But­ler: I was Head of Sto­ry on Cora­line and first showed the idea to Hen­ry Sel­l­ick. I had always been obsessed with hor­ror and want­ed to make this Scoo­by Doo-esque hor­ror sto­ry for kids. He read that and said ​“this is great, we should show it to Travis [Knight, Lai­ka Pres­i­dent].” I didn’t do any pitch to Travis, it was just ​“Read this and tell me what you think.” As I recall, he called me to his office and told me ​“I want it to be our next movie and I want you to direct it.” He says that my response was sit­ting there in shock star­ing at him for a few minutes!

Travis had read the first 30 pages and went ​“Where’s the rest?” I said ​“Oh, it’s back home!” and it wasn’t! I hadn’t fin­ished writ­ing it! I fin­ished that first draft as quick­ly as I could.

How hard was it work­ing out the tone of the film?

That was a dai­ly con­cern. I direct­ed with Sam Fell and it real­ly helped hav­ing some­body you can con­stant­ly check your­self on. There’s a lot of so-called ​“spooky” kids’ stuff, but much of that is actu­al­ly pret­ty tame. It might use grotesque imagery, but it’s not real­ly delv­ing into dark sub­ject mat­ter. Para­Nor­man doesn’t shy away from those top­ics of death, judge­ment, guilt, past sins, per­se­cu­tion. We want­ed it to feel like a roller­coast­er where you have peaks and troughs. You have moments which are gen­uine­ly upset­ting and scary, but you have to off­set them though not too much so.

Of course, we were mak­ing this thing many, many times. We make the movie in sto­ry­boards to cre­ate an ani­mat­ic and we watch that thing so many times to see how it plays. Hav­ing that process means you can see how far you’re going with the dra­ma, the hor­ror, the comedy.

Watch­ing back again, I was struck by how truth­ful­ly bit­ter­sweet and melan­cholic much of Para­Nor­man is, par­tic­u­lar­ly by the end­ing. I feel like a less con­fi­dent movie would’ve tried for a full uplift.

I think the char­ac­ter that’s most impor­tant on how that plays out is Per­ry. He is the world’s worst dad in so many ways! I didn’t want to get to the end and he’s sud­den­ly a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter, because that’s not how life works. What we get is Per­ry awk­ward­ly mak­ing an effort. That last scene where he acknowl­edges the ghost of his moth­er might be sit­ting next to him? That’s him try­ing to see things from Norman’s point-of-view. It’s not per­fect, but it’s a first step, and that feels real to me.

I remem­ber watch­ing the film in cin­e­mas back in 2012 and hav­ing a small rev­e­la­tion to the reveal Mitch’s sex­u­al­i­ty at the end. If you hold it to 2022 stan­dards, it’s real­ly minor. But back then, to some­body like me, it was an ​“Oh, cool, I won­der why this speaks to me…”

Yes!

Was that some­thing you had to fight for or did it sail through with­out any pushback?

Mitch’s gay reveal was specif­i­cal­ly placed at the end because the movie is about judge­ment. Every char­ac­ter in the movie is either judged or judg­ing, and I want­ed to make the audi­ence com­plic­it in that. I want­ed to make them feel like they knew a char­ac­ter just by look­ing at them. The reveal of Mitch’s gay­ness is almost an aside but I think that every­one who watch­es the movie is tak­en aback by it because they made an assump­tion based on the way he talks and his char­ac­ter; he’s a dumb jock.

That was all in from day one. Travis was always onboard. At no point did any­one try to get me to change it, because I think they all under­stood it was intrin­sic to the genet­ics of the sto­ry. As a gay man, I nev­er got the chance to talk about that in my work. It just wasn’t an option, so it was lib­er­at­ing to do some­thing like that.

One thing that I am very proud about with Mitch, he’s not just defined by his sex­u­al­i­ty. That’s not why he’s in the movie. He has a part to play. Inclu­siv­i­ty and diver­si­ty are impor­tant so long as not at every queer char­ac­ter is there just to be The Queer Char­ac­ter. They can be a char­ac­ter who just hap­pens to be queer. I don’t want them to just tell a sto­ry about how they strug­gled with their gen­der or been bul­lied. I want the diver­si­ty to include the types of char­ac­ters that are queer.

How did you come across [char­ac­ter design­er] Hei­di Smith?

I knew I want­ed some­thing real­ly dif­fer­ent so I went through a col­lec­tion of stu­dent port­fo­lios and that’s where I found Heidi’s work. Going through so many sim­i­lar sketch­es and then reach­ing hers to find these beau­ti­ful­ly grotesque designs. What I want­ed to do with Para­Nor­man was not pret­ti­fy it, I want­ed it to have all the lumps and bumps of real-life. Blithe Hol­low was a pret­ty run­down place in many ways and I want­ed that to fol­low through to the char­ac­ters. The designs I saw from Hei­di were per­fect, they imme­di­ate­ly seemed right.
Of course, the chal­lenge was that asym­me­try doesn’t work well in three-dimen­sions. You’re mak­ing pup­pets with dif­fer­ent­ly-sized legs and feet, no necks, no wrists; all major no-nos. So, there was a lot of try­ing to fig­ure out how to make these pup­pets that don’t behave them­selves work. How to make a char­ac­ter walk with dif­fer­ent­ly-sized legs yet still look like a reg­u­lar walk.

Were there any tech­ni­cal feats you weren’t able to pull off?

There were times when I was writ­ing where I found myself won­der­ing ​“I have no idea how we’re gonna do this.” But we pushed and found a way. On these movies, you’re fail­ing all the time. You’ll try some­thing and it doesn’t work, so you’ll try it a dif­fer­ent way. You might tweak the arms slight­ly on a pup­pet so they’re not so off-kil­ter, or the design of a door­frame in a con­cept art you find in prac­tice can’t actu­al­ly fit a pup­pet so you have to widen the door­frame. Lit­tle things like that are a con­stant through­out pro­duc­tion, but there was no one thing I want­ed to do that we couldn’t.

At times, that pow­er was kin­da ter­ri­fy­ing. Aggie was a com­bi­na­tion of stop-motion, CG, 2D. We threw every­thing at her and I’m so glad we did cos she looks so unique! But when I first saw her on-stage, it was basi­cal­ly an arma­ture with bumps on it as reg­istry marks. I remem­ber think­ing ​“How is this ever going to look good?!” Then the tests start­ed com­ing through and I realised this was some­thing special.

For its 10^th anniver­sary, PARA­NOR­MAN is back in cin­e­mas in 4K for the first time.