ParaNorman

The film avoids the pandering of many animated features, bringing an acerbic edge and a thrilling intelligence to its story.

"ParaNorman" took a huge risk on a scarier concept, and it paid off enormously.

What's truly marvelous about the stop-motion fantasia ParaNorman is the way it acknowledges adolescence as a daily horror show.

I admire its character and production design, which achieve the kind of look that sets stop-motion animation apart from CGI.

"ParaNorman" is never less than entertaining, but you'll have to follow it into a strange purgatory between two opposing genres.

Chances are most kids, and most adults, will find "Paranorman" perfectly horrible in the best possible way.

Employs stop-motion animation to provide hand-crafted appeal to the clever and surprisingly scary story of a Massachusetts town whose witch-hunting past catches up with it on its 300th anniversary.

A colorfully macabre stop-motion animation comedy that embraces the sociopolitical allegories of George A. Romero's zombie pictures and reworks them into a feature-length episode of "Scooby-Doo."

"ParaNorman" expertly balances scary and funny elements of the story, with a surprisingly heartwarming conclusion.

The world of Blithe Hollow exists in real space. The residents have real bags under their eyes, real bellies at their belt buckles. Ugliness alternates with rapturous beauty ...

It may be the most fun you'll have with ghosts and zombies all year.

An entertaining and visually attractive family-friendly story.

The story, an amusing if not especially fresh tale involving a witch and some Puritans, is principally a vehicle for the movie's meticulously detailed pictorial beauty, which turns each scene into an occasion for discovery and sometimes delight.

The spirit of great stop-motion animators like George Pal and Ray Harryhausen lives on in ParaNorman, and not just as a ghost: It's so real you could almost reach out and touch it.

"ParaNorman" has plenty of rambunctious thrills to give the kiddies goosebumps, while older connoisseurs of stop-motion animation will appreciate the Laika studio's inventive visuals.

The movie has its moments of dark whimsy and cheeky wit, but most of what it has is body parts.

It's not just Pixar that kicks ass in animation. There's magic in ParaNorman, a small miracle in stop-motion 3D from the wizards at Laika.

ParaNorman, blessed with otherworldly animation, can't escape the demons of story.

Laika, the animation outfit behind 2009's marvelous stop-motion adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline, scores another one for the dark side with this endearingly sweet and spooky-ookie ode to the living, the dead, and the in-between.

This swell stop-motion animation operates on a wavelength similar to that of Laika's debut feature, Coraline, with assured character comedy counterbalanced by a solemn sense of macabre wonder.