Skewed Naturalism: An Exclusive Interview With ParaNorman Director Chris Butler

We Got This Covered: I want to talk about the animation for a little bit. This is the latest in a line of stop motion films that use the medium to illustrate a horror-based story. Do you think there’s something inherent to the aesthetics of stop-motion that works better than other styles when telling a scary story?

Chris Butler: Yes, I don’t know whether it works better, but it is deeply part of a tradition within the medium. I think that goes right back to when the medium started. It was literally kind of like black magic. You’re literally bringing a real object, a real inanimate object to life. If you look at some of the pioneers of the medium, they were playing around with chicken skeletons, and creepy things in the shadows. So by its nature, it’s always had that kind of slightly sinister magic to it.

If you think about other techniques of animation – let’s say, take Norman’s, I don’t know, his backpack. In 2D animation, it’s a drawing of a backpack. In CG animation, it’s a digital representation, a digital backpack. In stop-motion, it is a backpack, it’s real, and I think that sense of tangible, imperfect reality is – it’s magical. It has a warmth to it that you can relate to, it has some sort of nostalgia to it, it reminds you of playing with dolls.

But there’s also something slightly creepy about it. I think over the years, different pioneers of this medium have leant on that, because it is so firmly entrenched in it. Tim Burton, obviously, it’s the perfect fit for his macabre sensibilities, same for Henry Selick. So I think, yeah, it’s a natural fit to spooky stories. I don’t think it’s the only fit, and I think what’s interesting now is that the medium is opening up, and some of the limitations of it are disappearing. I think it is a medium that can be used to tell any kind of story. It just so happens that I’ve been working on this for a long time, and it just so happens that this is about zombies, but I don’t think Laika is just interested in telling spooky stories with stop-motion. I think they want to use the medium to tell more diverse tales.

We Got This Covered: I felt the film has certain aesthetic similarities with some of the work Henry Selick and Tim Burton have done, but on the whole it has a very unique style. What is it about the style that you as a director were trying to distinguish from other works?

Chris Butler: Well, actually, just going into it with that in mind is the first step. Like you say, we’ve seen creepy stop-motion before, so I knew for a fact that I didn’t want to tell a black-and-white, Victorian horror story. I didn’t want to reference the kind of fifties monster movies so much. Yes, it’s about weird creatures, so I thought the best starting point would actually be to go to an era of moviemaking that hadn’t really been touched by this medium, which was the eighties, the seventies and eighties. The lure of Technicolor of the Italian horror makers. That instantly gave us a different palette from what we’d seen before, certainly a different palette than Tim and Henry both use, and it sets us apart instantly. We looked at movies of that time, and I think it was always on mind mind: I don’t want to ape other people, neither of us did, [co-director] Sam Fell and myself. The studio doesn’t.

And you know, I was storyboarding on Coraline, and I worked on it for three years. When I started doing little sketches in the development of this project, I found myself – I found it very difficult to get out of Coraline, to get out of drawing in that style, but I didn’t want to just be Coraline. I wanted to find something different. So I started looking around for artists who haven’t really been used before, or certainly – you know, I didn’t want to – we’re not making a Pixar movie, we’re not making a Dreamworks movie, there’s so many other things you can lean towards for different styles.

So for the character designs, I found a CalArt student whose work stood out, it just did not fit the usual trends in animation schools. It was illustrative, and scrappy, and scrumpy, and instantly I knew that that was something worth doing. I think that was our approach every step of the way, it was to try and find something that had its own voice. I think that was our approach. Nelson Lowry, our production designer, he took that a step further and he used that kind of scrappiness, but also he’s very keenly observed the real world, he wanted to make this feel – call it ‘skewed naturalism.’ We wanted it to feel like a recognizable place that exists, so that when we go to the supernatural places, we have that contrast.

Our interview concluded there. I’d like to thank Chris very enthusiastically for his time, and urge all our readers to check out ParaNorman, now playing in 3D and 2D theatres everywhere.