'Conformity doesn't beget greatness'

Ben, D'Arcy and I saw ParaNorman on Friday. It's about an 11-year-old boy who's branded a freak at school because of his ability to communicate with the dead.

The movie is the result of 3D stop-motion animation. Handmade puppets are brought to life by animators who move them one frame at a time, 24 frames a second.

I liked how lead animator Travis Knight described the value of Norman and the team who created him in the Globe and Mail.

"We live in a world that wants to burnish the rough edges and straighten the crooked line, but conformity doesn’t beget greatness,” said Knight. “What resonates with me is that the very thing that sets Norman apart is the thing his community needs. Norman’s story is also the story of the people who made the film – the freakshow, the weirdoes, the people who see the world in a different way and thus enrich it.

...“Norman is just a nine-inch tall puppet,” Knight says. “One of the things that gives stop-motion its inherent magic is that you’re seeing something imperfect and thus undeniably human – because it’s made by human hands.”