ParaNorman

Sam Fell and Chris Butler open with a ghost story and close with a trial. The curse chasing the town comes from a child who was wronged, and the last act asks the audience to pity the thing it has spent the film running from. The real innovation is in the faces. Laika had used black and white 3D printers on Coraline; here it moved to colour printing, and 31,000 separate face parts were produced for the characters’ expressions. By fxguide’s account, cleaning and coating those parts took five to six hours per batch and the archive grew to 1,257 boxes. 178 puppets were built for 61 characters. For the finale Laika mixes stop motion with computer effects and hand drawn animation, so the least literal scene is also the most hybrid in technique. In the closing scene Mitch mentions a boyfriend. Butler defended it by saying a film telling people not to judge others has to have the strength of its convictions. It was nominated for Animated Feature and lost to Brave. A good fit if you want the villain turning out to be a victim treated as the point rather than a twist. Not for families planning to watch with small children, since the mob scene and the corpses sit outside the usual range of family animation.