When production designer Nelson Lowry first approached the making of the animated film ParaNorman, he had a goal: Nothing should be perfect. Lines didn’t have to be straight, inspiration would be found in mistakes, and the final product should looks as much like the “beautiful, expressive napkin sketch” that it came from as possible.
He got his wish. ParaNorman, which is up for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars this weekend, is a 3-D printed, stop-motion wonder of a film — right down to each and every jagged edge. Lowry says this commitment to warts-and-all animation is ingrained at the movie’s studio, Laika Entertainment, and supported by CEO Travis Knight, who “is very interested in pushing the medium of stop-motion and is very happy for things to be kind of edgy.”
That’s not to say that the film about a boy who speaks to spooks wasn’t meticulously crafted. The faces of each of the film’s 27 characters were 3-D printed in many, many iterations (the film’s titular character Norman’s facial parts were capable of 1.5 million expressions, for example) and every minute of the movie required dozens of different faces for each character. But when it came to the sets Lowry was working on, he liked the idea of happy accidents that could bring life to Norman’s town of Blithe Hollow. Those little imperfections, he added, are something that can only happen when working with real-stop motion sets and not computer animation.
“Physical stuff is a little harder to control and there’s more surprises and you can really exploit those surprises if you do it carefully. So a stain or a ripped edge or a broken piece of material might have a really interesting shape and you can actually build that into the design,” Lowry told Wired. “Digital stuff — unless you create some fantastical algorithm that puts that in there — it does exactly what you want it to do so that you never get many surprises.”
Whether it’s analog or digital, the type of animation is an interesting part of this year’s Best Animated Feature Oscar race. Three of the flicks are stop-motion creations — ParaNorman, Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie and Pirates! Band of Misfits — while the other two — Pixar’s Brave and Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph — are computer-animated. Burton’s flick is in black-and-white. Ralph has a unique style based on its videogame world setting. Brave used Pixar’s new Presto system. It’ll be interesting to see which of these varied offerings the Academy voters find the most compelling.
So, is Lowry anxious about the Feb. 24 award ceremony? You could say that.
“It’s a little nerve-wracking,” Lowry said. “It’s fun to pretend awards don’t matter, but they kind of do.”
Check out the gallery above to see how ParaNorman came together — from sketch, to set, to screen.
