ParaNorman

A timid, bookish kid (voice by Kodi Smit-McPhee), bullied at school and punished at home because he talks to ghosts, tries to save his town from a witch’s curse dating back 300 years, his mission complicated by an invasion of zombies. Directors Chris Butler and Sam Fell dress Butler’s script up with a visually inventive mix of stop-motion puppet animation and CGI, aiming at the delicious creepiness of The Nightmare Before Christmas or Coraline, but evidently that sort of thing is harder to pull off than Tim Burton and Henry Selick make it look. Here the effect is not so much creepy as simply unpleasant, and Butler’s basic theme—be nice to people: Today’s schoolyard bully is tomorrow’s witch-hunting bigot—becomes as dreary and preachy as a finger-shaking lecture from a purse-lipped school counselor.