Monster House

Directed by Gil Kenan

There’s no better example of Pop versus Hip than Monster House’s easy superiority to A Scanner Darkly. The latter cartoon is for audiences who want to think they’re smarter than others while the former takes its audience through brilliantly stylized, shared human experience. If that sounds like I’m coming from the “Truth Hurts” school of film criticism, understand the truth about Monster House: it’s sensational Pop art—visually terrific and emotionally compelling.

Not merely spooky, Monster House demonstrates how we project hidden fears through culture and custom. Director Gil Kenan uses the lifelike, textured animation that was so freaky—and wrong—in The Polar Express to evoke Everychild’s Halloween fantasy. Twelve-year-old DJ (Mitchell Musso), his best friend Chowder (Sam Lerner) and a neighborhood girl Jenny (Spencer Locke) stake out mean Mr. Nebbercracker’s house, a ramshackle manse whose facade resembles an angry face. This more-than-haunted dwelling grips their imaginations; the tactile animation transforms lifelikenesses into the uncanny.

Kenan renders neighborhood coziness with visionary wit and beauty—the smooth nighttime skies and self-illumined street lamps move suburbia into Magritte territory. These are the loveliest animated hues since The Iron Giant and yet they rouse domestic panic as satirically and precisely as Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. This recalls the knowing sophistication New York magazine misread back in ’82 when it fatuously proclaimed “Innocence can be hip” about E.T.—since then, snarky film culture has remained confused about how pop sophistication works. But Monster House neither condescends to hipsters nor family audiences; it enthralls through its emotionally credible storytelling. Although the protagonists are pre-teens (“I’m having lots and lots of Puberty,” says DJ ), these child characters act out complications about sex and the larger world to which even adults can relate. Learning from experience isn’t necessarily hip, but Monster House shows it can be artful.

Outclassing insipid animated films like Cars and Shrek, Monster House best recalls Delmar Daves’ 1947 The Red House, a classic allegory about teens’ mystified by sex and the specter of adulthood. Kenan’s cartoon context gives those themes surprise and wonder. I saw Monster House amidst an audience of noisy kids who went silent from the astonishing first image of a huge, golden autumnal leaf signaling Halloween. They remained hushed throughout (even to the final, sublime image of a red kite). What those kids felt as cinematic shock and awe, adults will feel as rapt and restorative fascination. Monster House is an ideal movie of its kind.