Monster House
Screenplay by Dan Harmon & Rob Schrab and Pamela Pettler; story by Dan Harmon & Rob Schrab
Directed by Gil Kenan
Columbia
2006
Rating:


Recent animated movies have become so focused on spewing pop culture references and mainly serving as advertisements for tie-in plush toys that most of the joy has been sucked out of them. One of the most amazing things about "Monster House" is just how exhilarating it is as a work of pure entertainment and an expression of the wonder of childhood rather than another stab at "Shrek"-ian post-modernism. Director Gil Kenan, a 2002 UCLA film school graduate making his directorial debut, has created a film that's in the same vein as the early movies of executive producers Robert Zemeckis ("Back to the Future") and Steven Spielberg ("Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "E.T.," his scripts for "The Goonies" and "Poltergeist"), turning suburbia into a place where wonderfully uncanny things can happen and children can be heroes.

"Monster House" revisits the childhood themes of Gothic haunted houses and mean-old neighbors and turns them on their head: Mr. Nebbercracker (voiced by Steve Buscemi) is so adamant about kids like DJ (Mitchell Musso), Chowder (Sam Lerner) and Jenny (Spencer Locke) staying off his lawn because his lawn could actually eat them. Nebbercracker's house is literally a monster, with a rug that rolls out as a tongue to snatch intruders, glaring window-eyes and a chandelier for an uvula (that's the dangly thing at the back of the throat, not proof the house is a girl as Chowder humorously thinks).

Kenan improves upon the motion-capture work Zemeckis used on the plasticine and heartless "The Polar Express" to turn his young characters into real children. For the first time in a computer animated movie, the acting is actually impressive as is Kenan's swirling camerawork. Credit is also due to the script by Dan Harmon & Rob Schrab and Pamela Pettler, which makes the children realistically funny, smart, awkward, awed and frightened rather than glib. Rooting the film in such fully realized characters is no small part of why the fantasy works so well, returning the magic to animated movies.

Posted Saturday, January 20, 2007

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/monster.house