| MONSTER HOUSE |
 2006 - USADirector: Gil Kenan
- Reviewed by Vickie
Using motion-capture animation techniques, the same ones utilized in Polar Express, the film aims to create “realistic”-looking animated people. My big question is: WHY? If you just want to create animated characters that look like real humans, why not just, oh I don’t know, use real humans?? Heck, given the voice cast assembled for this movie, seeing the actual actors instead of their creepy onscreen counterparts would have been a thousand times more interesting and infinitely less frightening. The story follows a boy named DJ (voiced by Mitchel Musso), who looks like a CGI version of former America’s Next Top Model contestant Elyse Sewell, and his chunky pal Chowder (voiced by Sam Lerner), as they team with plucky gal Jenny (voiced by Spencer Locke) to battle the menacing, evil titular domicile. See, the house has been eating children, toys and random passers-by for ages, and DJ believes it has something to do with the toothless, bug-eyed, skeletal old man who lives there. His name is Nebbercracker, he’s voiced by Steve Buscemi, he screams all his dialogue and he will, guaranteed, make small children watching the movie cry outright. But when DJ believes he’s accidentally killed Nebbercracker, the house becomes even more threatening, forcing the trio of pint-sized adventurers to embark on a perilous mission to, well, kill it. Naturally, no adult or semi-adult will believe their story about the monster house. These doubting Thomases include DJ’s parents (voiced by Catherine O’Hara and Fred Willard), his goth-y babysitter Zee (voiced by Maggie Gyllenhaal), her TERRIFYING boyfriend (voiced by Jason Lee, in a role that will finish off any kids not wailing as a result of Nebbercracker), and a pair of bumbling cops (voiced by Kevin James and Nick Cannon). So, the kids are pretty much on their own. Thing is, the filmmakers save all the action for the latter third of the movie, and the slow build of the story makes it tough to get excited about. After the third or fourth time we watch the house act up and then settle down, we get it. Something nutty’s going on. So why waste a good 50-60 minutes on set-up? Once the kids get inside the house and it fights back, things get interesting… but even that is short-lived. The story is already fairly basic—kids battle evil house—so you’d hope for some flourishes around the edges, but they don’t come. Similarly, the much-ballyhooed animation is, as mentioned, creepy. (I know I’m repeating myself, but it really can’t be said enough.) The characters don’t look real but they don’t look like good animation, either. They don’t possess the bouncy elasticity or charm of Pixar creations, and they don’t look like human flesh and blood. They’re stuck somewhere in the ethereal in-between space, and that makes them look oddly stiff. Numerous sequences have clearly been inserted to show off the technology—Zee dancing, Chowder making faces—but they’re uninteresting and actually detract from the film. Again, I think this movie would have been so much better as a live-action film using the same actors who are, unfortunately, stuck behind disturbing digital alter egos instead. Animate the house all you want—especially since finding an actual house able to yank itself off its foundation and lumber down a street might be tough—but let the humans be human. Please. |
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Here’s the thing about computer-animated humans: they are creepy.
Always. No matter how “lifelike” the animators promise their creations
are, or how funny/cute/colorful they’re meant to be, they are creepy.
Scary. Unsettling. Decidedly non-human. And nowhere is that more
apparent in Monster House. [An aside to Moviepie’s 