As I drive around town and the surrounding country, I frequently see houses that, viewed from the right angle, look remarkably like faces. Two upstairs windows, a centered front door, the right angle of light, and voila! the house is alive.

      Monster House, the latest in this summer’s seemingly interminable outpouring of animated features, takes that passing resemblance and runs with it, in the process turning out a surprisingly entertaining blend of tweener film and horror.

      Halloween is approaching as the film opens.  A young girl rides happily along the sidewalk on her tricycle before stalling on the lawn of a run-down old house. A goblinish old man emerges to scare her off and confiscate the trike.

      So far, so familiar.  The scary old person’s house, a graveyard for lost balls and other toys, is a fixture in childhood folklore.  Things get really creepy later, when the old man is hospitalized with an apparent heart attack and the house takes on a life of its own.

      Before you know it, the house has gobbled up an adolescent slacker, two cops, and a curious dog.  Oddly, since the scary house story comes from the younger crowd, none of the story’s children are eaten, though several come close.

      And of course, no adults will believe the kids’ tale of a house come to life, so it is up to the tweener trio of D.J. (Mitch Musso), Chowder (Sam Lerner), and Jenny (Spencer Locke) to defeat the monster house.  They do so, with great ingenuity and courage (along with a little help from a surprising quarter).

      Other than the marvelously animated house itself, there’s nothing terribly original in plot or characters.  The three kids echo the Harry Potter triumvirate – the brave, noble hero (D.J./Harry), the slightly dim but loyal buddy (Chowder/Ron), and the intelligent, red-haired girl pal (Jenny/Hermione). 

      Those characters weren’t even all that new when Harry Potter came along.  At least Monster House adds realistic tension as D.J. and Chowder compete for the affections of the fetching young Jenny.

      Other characters are rather stereotyped: a funny, beefy cop; his over-eager rookie partner; a slacker videogame genius; an anxious, hyperprotective mother (Catherine O’Hara); and best of all, a sadistic babysitter (Maggie Gyllenhall), yet another cliché drawn from childhood legend.

      What redeems the movie despite these echoes of so many other films and books is a first-rate sense of pacing, especially evident as the tension builds when the children enter the house in an attempt to end its reign of terror, and the tragic yet pathetic back story of the house and its crotchety resident, Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi).

       Monster House is animated with “captured-motion” technology, in which actors are filmed and then, through the magic of the computer, turned into drawings.  (The same technique was used in The Polar Express a couple of years ago.)

      No question this method results in realistic movement of the animated characters, but it can be somewhat off-putting.  The backgrounds seem hyper-realistic, but the characters – with too-smooth plastic skin, Play-Doh hair, over-large heads and rail-thin bodies – are sufficiently unrealistic to create a sense of disconnection.

      That disconnect bothered me for about the first five minutes of the movie.  Then the story and the appealing characters drew me in. It will you, too.

      

 This review appeared in the Aberdeen American News on July 23,  2006.

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