Monster House a Winner for Older Children
By Orson Scott Card
I hate horror movies. And the promos for Monster House made it look as though the filmmakers were trying to do an animated scare picture.
But the movie itself is far closer to Indiana Jones or Harry Potter than to Nightmare on Elm Street. And real attention is paid to having interesting, believable characters with human stories – rather more like The Iron Giant than Toy Story.
Anything I tell you about the plot that isn’t summed up in the title will spoil a surprise – but I can assure you that almost all the surprises are good ones, in the sense that they are there to entertain rather than shock you.
The voice acting was superb; the surprise is that without trying to resemble any stars, the face work was the best I’ve seen in computer animation.
Where Polar Express became rather disturbing with its dead-looking faces, this movie never does. (I have lately learned that the deadness of the faces in Polar Express came from the fact that they did not use the full range of motion-capture points for more than a handful of the characters.)
In Monster House, I don’t know whether the facial expressions were captured or designed – it doesn’t matter to me as an audience member. What I care about is the fact that the faces had the ability to express subtle emotions – well, subtle for animation, anyway. The chubby sidekick has a great face; we can see the snootiness in the preppie girl gradually give way to genuine warmth and trust; and the face of the old man who tends the monster house is superb – he has all the exaggeration that animation can offer, without losing the ability to show humanity as well.
The script was full of good satire – in fact, in some ways we see that the house the hero lives in is a kind of monster house for him, even though nobody in it means to make his life horrible. Well, the babysitter does, just a little …
I enjoyed every minute of this movie; my wife, who hates horror films even more than I do (or so she says; I’m not really sure it’s possible) had no qualms with this one. And the movie definitely passed the twelve-year-old-audience-member test.
You don’t have to have kids to enjoy this movie. In fact, very young kids might find this movie a bit of a nightmare-maker. What older kids see as funny, little kids see as scary.
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