A version of this story appears in Friday’s Weekend Look section of The Oklahoman.
Anna Kendrick channels teenage angst for “ParaNorman”
The Oscar-nominated actress lends her voice to “pink sweatsuit-festooned” older sister of the oddball hero in the 3-D stop-motion horror-comedy, her first animated film.
LOS ANGELES — With her first animated feature, Anna Kendrick got to channel some of her best childhood movie memories, along with some of her worst adolescent moments.
“This was a great first experience doing something like this, to play someone so volatile and such a force of nature in the way that only a pink sweatsuit-festooned teenager can be,” Kendrick said with a laugh during a recent press day for the movie “ParaNorman.”
“It was great to go into the recording studio and just kind of make a fool of myself.”
In the new 3-D stop-motion horror-comedy, the sleepy hamlet of Blithe Hollow runs its local economy on spooky lore about a witch hunt that happened there 300 years ago. The ghost stories may keep the townsfolk in the black, but they regard 11-year-old Norman Babcock (voice of Kodi Smit-McPhee) as a black sheep because he can actually see and talk to ghosts. including his long-deceased grandmother (Elaine Stritch). Even Norman’s family — his blustering father (Jeff Garlin), ditzy mother (Leslie Mann) and shallow older sister Courtney (Kendrick) — are perplexed or downright scornful about the boy’s special abilities.
When zombies begin to rise from their graves, it lends credence to creepy old Uncle Prenderghast’s (John Goodman) claims that the centuries-old witch’s curse is real and about to come true. And only Norman — with the help of his sister, his loyal pal Neil (Tucker Albrizzi), Neil’s strapping older brother Mitch (Casey Affleck) and school bully Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) — has the supernatural stuff to save the town.
[hr]