Shack attack

Noel Vera

Gil Kenan's "Monster House" is amusing enough, a mix of Steven
Spielberg suburbia, Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window," the "Evil
Dead" movies (pasteurized and homogenized, of course), bits of "To
Kill a Mockingbird" and the Halloween sequence from Vincente
Minnelli's "Meet Me in St. Louis." Three kids notice some funny
goings-on in the house across the street: the owner falls down dead
(through in a way the fault of the kids) and various neighbors are
either lured, rolled up or tossed into the house's open maw of a
door, never to walk out again.

It's a thorough immersion into the kids' worlds, and best of all
it's done with a minimum of sticky sentiment or the kind of
mandatory moralizing kid's animation is supposed to have, the
medicine that's supposed to make the spoonful of sugar necessary.
Even when we eventually learn the house's secret, it isn't the kind
of revelation meant to uplift and instruct the child, but a sad and
sordid story more appropriate to "The Twilight Zone" than to Cartoon
Network. The three children--curious D.J. (Mitchel Musso), pretty if
uptight Jenny (Spencer Locke), gross (in every sense) Chowder (Sam
Lerner)--are distinct enough characters, their interactions
interesting enough that you feel like following their plans and what
becomes of them. It's not a bad way to spend ninety minutes.

I do have reservations about the 'motion capture,' the way they have
of photographing human actors and rendering them in animated three-
dimensional shapes. Critics have gushed over how realistic it is,
how it makes the characters' movements unpredictable and lifelike
(they cite a basketball game--obvious excuse to showcase the
technique--between D.J. and Chowder), how it adds to the
believability of the whole thing. I suppose they're right, but if I
wanted to watch two kids play basketball, why can't I just step out
into the street and watch two kids play basketball? I don't share
this thirst for greater and greater realism in animation--if they
badly want to perfect the technique, I just as badly want to tell
them to use a live-action camera and be done with it.

The great animation masters--Chuck Jones, Fritz Freleng, Taiji
Yabushita, Max Fleischer, Paul Grimault, among others--eschewed
attempts at shortcut realism (in their days it would be
called "rotoscoping"); the brilliance in their technique was in the
way it evoked realism (or, at least in the case of Jones and
Freleng, convincingly painful motion) without merely copying it. A
relatively inexpressive animated face is given a quick grimace, or a
funny catchphrase given a certain inflection, or better still
someone given a moment of pensive silence, and character is
illuminated like an incandescent bulb flaring into light. Difficult
to say what I mean, but the analogy that comes to mind is how master
puppeteers suggest personality and emotional nuance through wooden
puppets with carved faces, through delicate gestures of the limbs
and body. A slow nod of the head just so, and you can evoke
tenderness, sadness, resignation; the raising of a carved hand
thusly--held at this angle and for only a brief moment--and you
suggest greeting, defiance, recognition. We may have gained
something with this "motion capture;" many animators no doubt
breathe a sigh of relief at the labor-saving possibilities, as much
as they slaver over the visual possibilities, but at the same time
something ineffable has been lost. Call it some aspect of
storytelling, or imagination, or art, or call it yet another
distinctive quality of animation as opposed to simple live-action
filmmaking, but something has been lost.

The "motion-captured" characters sneak into the house; some amusing
analogs to the human body are noted (Pointing at a
chandelier: "Look! That must be its uvula!" "Oh, so it's a GIRL
house…"), the usual CGI chaos ensues. There's a moment of genuine
pathos as we learn the story of Mr. Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi),
the deceased homeowner; like Boo Radley in "To Kill a Mockingbird"
it turns out that he's more misunderstood than malevolent, and that
his link to the house is thornier and more complex than we might
suppose. We can go further (skip the rest of the paragraph if you
plan to see the picture) and say that the house is like a monster
equivalent of a uterus, and that Nebbercracker is like a fetus
staying decades past term: the umbilical cord that binds them now
poisons them, tainting what should be fond memories of each other
with overprotective paranoia on the part of the house, guilt and
claustrophobic resentment on the part of the man. Not perhaps the
most profound treatment of a monster-victim relationship I know, but
surprisingly sophisticated in a kiddie cartoon.

Unfortunately at the picture's end the action descends to the level
of a, well, kiddie cartoon: house on legs, steam shovels, mayhem
galore; the climax involves a series of complicated acts of heroism
familiar to anyone who plays video games (take MacGuffin, shimmy up
crane, drop into chimney). The movie, just starting to get
interesting with its macabre version of undying love, retreats to
childhood's lust for zoom and boom. "Monster House" for all the
skill that went into making it and all the promise of becoming a
genuine gothic drama, ends up regressing into just another summer
flick.

(First published in Businessworld, 9/8/06)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)