Sam Fell
24 connections found
Filmography
View:
Connections, in both directions
One marvels at the visuals (production design by Nelson Lowry, "Fantastic Mr. Fox"), though, from the Salem, MA inspired historical district and blue collar neighborhoods to references to horror films from childhood through "The Nightmare Before Christmas."
ParaNorman was animated using 3D sculptures, in the same way as Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas were.
Simply put, it is no less than the most confident, fully realized, and just plain imaginative stop-motion animated feature since 1993's holiday classic "The Nightmare Before Christmas."
Though some people will undoubtedly criticize “ParaNorman” for its visual similarities to Henry Selick’s “Coraline” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” that’s just because stop-motion animation lends itself to those types of bizarre, ghoulish stories.
ParaNorman shares many aesthetic traits with Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas, but thanks to unique character and background designs, it overall looks a little unlike any other stop-motion film.
Stop-motion animation has given rise to some of the most fun-for-kids-and-adults cinematic stories of the last few decades – most famously, The Nightmare Before Christmas.
This is the second stop-motion animated feature from Laika to be made in 3D, but while one can see parallels to their earlier "Coraline," "ParaNorman," written by that film's storyboard supervisor Chris Butler and codirected by him and Sam Fell ("Flushed Away," "The Tale of Despereaux"), has a weaker story which is stretched out far enough to produce sag, ironic for a film whose every frame must be meticulously constructed.
If it reminds some viewers of 2009's "Coraline" (also a stop-motion animated product), that shouldn't be a surprise, considering the otherworldly plot aspects, its child protagonist and the fact that it comes from the same production house, Laika.
August 19, 2012 -- This animated film from the creators of “Coraline” is another film that fits into the Halloween theme of ghosts and witches.
And despite the supernatural parallels, "ParaNorman" isn't nearly as creepy - or as magnificent - as "Coraline," a gorgeous and unsettling masterwork that plumbed childhood fears with a hypnotizing grace.
This 3D stop-motion animated movie is even scarier but much funnier than the same production team's skilfully crafted Coraline in which a plucky little heroine escaped from her lonely mundane world into its horrific mirror image.
The first effort out of the gate is a stop-motion animated movie from Portland’s LAIKA, the studio behind Henry Selick’s Coraline.
Film references range from fairly obvious to sly as can be, from the opening cheesy '80s horror movie that Norman watches on TV, the zombie's yelling out for "Brainnnnnns!" to the cell phone ringtone that plays John Carpenter's immortal " Halloween " theme (this latter detail is followed up by a " Friday the 13th " nod even whilst still aping a direct scene from Carpenter's 1978 slasher watermark).
Many early gags in the stop-motion animation ParaNorman are associated with Norman’s collection of horror paraphernalia, which include a phone with the Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) theme for its ringtone.
Goodman is also particularly fun as Norman's zany brutish Uncle Prenderghast, with his role feeling somewhat of an homage to Peter Jackson's The Frighteners.
Dripping with hyper-saturated colors, textured with a faux-grainy film stock, and kicking things off with a playfully gruesome zombie attack, it has the air of a fright flick tailor-made for grown-up horror hounds to share with wee ones who aren’t quite ready for more intense fare like The Evil Dead or The Frighteners.
Everything is here from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), to the black brambles of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959), to references to the Friday the 13th and Halloween series — and, of course, the requisite zombie tropes.
For lovers of the dark, otherworldly and macabre, delighting through the 93-minute "ParaNorman" will be akin to attending a horror-themed amusement park, exploring a desolate and foreboding haunted house, and simultaneously watching 1985's "The Return of the Living Dead" and 1993's " Hocus Pocus " all rolled up into one.
Everything is here from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), to the black brambles of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959), to references to the Friday the 13th and Halloween series — and, of course, the requisite zombie tropes.
For lovers of the dark, otherworldly and macabre, delighting through the 93-minute "ParaNorman" will be akin to attending a horror-themed amusement park, exploring a desolate and foreboding haunted house, and simultaneously watching 1985's "The Return of the Living Dead" and 1993's " Hocus Pocus " all rolled up into one.
It's almost as if the textures and tone make the story spookier, and we can compare ParaNorman to the computer animated Monster House for a test drive.
For about an hour, ParaNorman is just about what one might expect and hope for from animation studio Laika: a gorgeous-looking stop-motion cartoon that operates somewhere at the intersection of Monster House and The Monster Squad , slyly harkening back to '80s Amblin adventures and B-grade creature features.
You could make a good Halloween triple feature with “Monster House,” “Coraline” and “ParaNorman.”
The eye candy that LAIKA has delivered is revolutionary and so advanced that it makes Sony’s classic Monster House look like absolute crap.
The film makes the animated “Monster House’’ look positively benign.
Perhaps the best way to sell you on this picture is to say it’s sort of like what The Goonies might’ve been, had The Goonies been beautifully animated and not terrible.
The tale that follows is part Something Wicked This Way Comes, part The Goonies.
And then ParaNorman--which begins as a sweet, strange, quiet little piece about a lonely boy who wants to be left alone with his late-night creature features and the company of his dead grandmother--turns into The Goonies minus the "diversity."
Like Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense, Norman sees dead people, and they’re everywhere.
The plot answers the simple question: What if Haley Joel Osment’s character from The Sixth Sense didn’t just whisper spookily about seeing dead people, but instead carried on normal conversations with them?
Like Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense, he can see and talk to ghosts.
In M. Night Shyamalan's superlative 1999 psychological horror film "The Sixth Sense" eight-year-old Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) eventually owns up "I see dead people," something the adults around him don't initially believe.
Enforcing this witty script, which is written by Karey Kirkpatrick (Chicken Run), John O’Farrell and Rachel Tunnard (Military Wives), are the returning characters that we all adored in Chicken Run: Ginger and Rocky are as lovable as always; rats Nick (Romesh Ranganathan, Cinderella) and Fetcher (Daniel Mays, 1917) play even bigger, friendlier roles; Fowler (David Bradley, Pinocchio) and Babs (Jane Horrocks, Sunshine on Leith) shine as brightly as they did in the first film, and are undoubtedly the pick of the bunch.
For about an hour, ParaNorman is just about what one might expect and hope for from animation studio Laika: a gorgeous-looking stop-motion cartoon that operates somewhere at the intersection of Monster House and The Monster Squad , slyly harkening back to '80s Amblin adventures and B-grade creature features.
It’s being promoted as being from Laika Entertainment, whose name was on Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (2005) and Henry Selick’s Coraline (2009).
With Norman - voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee - screenwriter Chris Butler, an artist on "Corpse Bride" and "Coraline," and co-director Sam Fell, who directed "The Tale of Despereaux," create a character in classic outcast-superhero comic-book tradition.
Director Chris Butler worked as a storyboard artist on this studio’s first feature, Coraline, and on Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, while co-director Sam Fell made the charming 2006 Aardman film Flushed Away.
“ParaNorman” creeps and crawls out of the mind of writer/co-director Chris Butler, a storyboard artist who honed his skills on Tim Burton’s “ Corpse Bride ” and Henry Selick’s “ Coraline .”
The stop-motion animated feature ParaNorman arrives courtesy of the same production company (Laika Entertainment) responsible for Coraline and Corpse Bride, so parents had best not take their small fry to the theater expecting to see talking cars or dancing penguins or anything else that would send the wee ones off to Dreamland with a smile on their face and a teddy bear (not Ted, of course) in their arms.
ParaNorman was written and directed by Chris Butler, who was a storyboard artist on Corpse Bride and a storyboard supervisor on Coraline , which is a great resume for a film like this.
As Norman’s lovable friend Niel, Tucker Albrizzi’s energy and enthusiasm are reminiscent of Russell in Up; he’s a truly wonderful character.
Like “Coraline,” “ParaNorman” and “The Boxtrolls,” which collectively announced Laika as a vital and distinctive creative force in the increasingly competitive field of big-budget animation, “Kubo and the Two Strings” brilliantly updates stop-motion, a venerable yet time-consuming mode of film production cherished for its hand-crafted, herky-jerky aesthetic.
The film from Laika, who also produced the excellent “The Boxtrolls,” “ParaNorman,” and “Coraline,” begins on an ocean, in the middle of a storm, in the dead of night.
The adventure fantasy “Kubo and the Two Strings” is seamless stop-motion storytelling, from Laika, the independent animation studio that gave us the darkly entertaining “Coraline,” “ParaNorman” and “The Boxtrolls.”
Laika , the independent studio behind morbid enchantments like “Coraline” and “ParaNorman,” has already established itself as a formidable bulwark against the ever-accelerating onslaught of computer-generated 3D cartoons, but “ Kubo and the Two Strings ” makes even the most painstaking of their previous movies feel like a trial run.
In that moment of this latest offering from the folks at Laika Entertainment -- that previously created the stop-motion animated films "Coraline," "ParaNorman" and "The Boxtrolls" -- the 12-year-old title character has found himself in a cave, along with those accompanying him on his journey (a talking monkey and a former samurai turned man-sized beetle), confronted by an enormous skeleton that's come to life.
After such fascinating movies as "Coraline" (2009), "ParaNorman" (2012) and "The Boxtrolls" (2014), Laika has created its greatest masterpiece: "Kubo and the Two Strings," a richly detailed and heart-aching story steeped in the powerful imagery of Japanese folk tales.
This is the second stop-motion animated feature from Laika to be made in 3D, but while one can see parallels to their earlier "Coraline," "ParaNorman," written by that film's storyboard supervisor Chris Butler and codirected by him and Sam Fell ("Flushed Away," "The Tale of Despereaux"), has a weaker story which is stretched out far enough to produce sag, ironic for a film whose every frame must be meticulously constructed.
Directed by Sam Fell (responsible for the decrepit Flushed Away) and newcomer Chris Butler, ParaNorman opens with a brilliant nod to the genre.
Butler, who also penned the ParaNorman script and was a storyboard artist on Coraline, and Fell, who directed the animated flicks The Tale of Despereaux and Flushed Away, create a wonderfully quirky world here in ParaNorman that feels vibrantly melancholy with so many horror homages peppered throughout that you'll need at least a second viewing to be able to catch most of them.
(The veteran Sam Fell, of the less spooky Flushed Away and The Tale of Despereaux, is a co-director.)
It also has some of the elements of the British studio Aardman Animations ("Wallace and Gromit"); "ParaNorman" is directed by Sam Fell (who co-directed Aardman's "Flushed Away") and Chris Butler, who also wrote it.
Co-directors Chris Butler (a Burton acolyte who wrote the screenplay) and Sam Fell (one of the brains behind the underappreciated Aardman effort Flushed Away ) try to remove some of the bite from the casually macabre material; for example, these slack-jawed Puritan undead never actually crave flesh.
The tale that follows is part Something Wicked This Way Comes, part The Goonies.
This is the second stop-motion animated feature from Laika to be made in 3D, but while one can see parallels to their earlier "Coraline," "ParaNorman," written by that film's storyboard supervisor Chris Butler and codirected by him and Sam Fell ("Flushed Away," "The Tale of Despereaux"), has a weaker story which is stretched out far enough to produce sag, ironic for a film whose every frame must be meticulously constructed.
Butler, who also penned the ParaNorman script and was a storyboard artist on Coraline, and Fell, who directed the animated flicks The Tale of Despereaux and Flushed Away, create a wonderfully quirky world here in ParaNorman that feels vibrantly melancholy with so many horror homages peppered throughout that you'll need at least a second viewing to be able to catch most of them.
(The veteran Sam Fell, of the less spooky Flushed Away and The Tale of Despereaux, is a co-director.)
The writing-directing debut of Chris Butler with co-director Sam Fell (2008's " The Tale of Despereaux "), this project, produced by LAIKA (the same studio behind 2009's " Coraline "), is filled to bursting with a passion and love for the horror genre that assures the story and characters are taken very seriously, even when the tone or the seldom ingeniously acerbic dialogue and visual cues also give it a rich, potent brand of unkiddified humor.
With Norman - voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee - screenwriter Chris Butler, an artist on "Corpse Bride" and "Coraline," and co-director Sam Fell, who directed "The Tale of Despereaux," create a character in classic outcast-superhero comic-book tradition.
It’s from an original screenplay by Chris Butler, an animator who’s also making his debut as co-director (with Sam Fell, who helmed “Flushed Away” and “The Tale of Despereaux”).
Dripping with hyper-saturated colors, textured with a faux-grainy film stock, and kicking things off with a playfully gruesome zombie attack, it has the air of a fright flick tailor-made for grown-up horror hounds to share with wee ones who aren’t quite ready for more intense fare like The Evil Dead or The Frighteners.