6.9 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Even for a 12-year old, D.J. Walters has a particularly overactive imagination. He is convinced that his haggard and crabby neighbor Horace Nebbercracker, who terrorizes all the neighborhood kids, is responsible for Mrs. Nebbercracker's mysterious disappearance. Any toy that touches Nebbercracker's property, promptly disappears, swallowed up by the cavernous house in which Horace lives. D.J. has seen it with his own eyes! But no one believes him, not even his best friend, Chowder. What everyone does not know is D.J. is not imagining things. Everything he's seen is absolutely true and it's about to get much worse than anything D.J could have imagined.
Starring: Steve Buscemi, Nick Cannon, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jon Heder, Kevin JamesFamily | 100% |
Animation | 81% |
Comedy | 57% |
Fantasy | 56% |
Holiday | 15% |
Mystery | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-2
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: LPCM 5.1
English: Dolby Digital 5.1
French: Dolby Digital 5.1
Korean: Dolby Digital 5.1
English, English SDH, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Cantonese, Korean, Thai
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Unless you live in one of those suburban developments where identical houses popped up simultaneously overnight, nearly every neighborhood has one. It stands sunken and menacing in a lot overgrown with weeds and tall grass. Summer heat and winter chills have curled its paint into tiny, yellowing scrolls and perhaps an upstairs window has been boarded up with a garbage bag and a few two-by-fours. To the adults, it’s a communal eyesore. “Really,” your dad might have said, “someone needs to do something about this.” The kids, however, tell tall tales passed down from older siblings. It’s haunted, they say. An old one-eyed witch lives there. If you lose a baseball over the picket fence—forget about it—you’ll never get it back. The brave or triple-dog-dared might venture to ding-dong-ditch the doorbell, and if successful they become instant legends at lunchtime cafeteria tables. The neighborhood haunted house is a spooky fixture of Americana, and Monster House—a CGI spectacle executively produced by Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg—has a firm, skeletal grasp on the childhood traditions and superstitions that it presents. While the film is geared toward older kids—tweeners, I hear they’re calling ‘em now—even adults may find this Halloween yarn to be a fond trip down memory lane.
We're gonna need a bigger bulldozer.
While not as inherently jaw-dropping as some Pixar productions, Sony Imageworks has given
Monster House a 1080p/MPEG-2 transfer that brings director Gil Kenan's vision to life
with strong colors and a potent sense of depth. The motion capture performances here work well
with a CGI aesthetic that is decidedly stylized and non-photorealistic, giving the film a slightly
three dimensional, stop-motion quality. Unlike The Polar Express, which also used
performance capture technology, Monster House sidesteps the creepiness of the uncanny
valley by giving its characters exaggerated and somewhat asymmetrical features.
The image itself isn't quite up to par with the best CGI films—few moments really wowed me—
but the transfer doesn't exhibit any of the issues, like banding or macroblocking, that sometimes
plague lesser releases. Black levels are appropriately strong throughout, and the film presents a
bold autumnal palette that's pleasingly interrupted by the ghastly neon greens and blues inside
the titular monster house. If I have one overriding complaint, it's that the image isn't quite as
sharp as it could be. While this is indeed a digital-to-digital transfer, the filmmakers decided to add
a thin layer of artificial grain in post-production. Whether this was to keep the film from appearing
too clinical, or just to add a cinematic flair, I'm not sure, but the grain is occasionally noticeable
and has a tendency to soften the overall look.
Monster House creaks and groans on Blu-ray with an uncompressed PCM 5.1 track that flat-out trumps the Dolby Digital 5.1 mix that's also included. When I first started the film, I hastily assumed the PCM track would be the default—never assume—and I wondered why the mix sounded conspicuously flat, with voices that were potted way too low. I quickly realized my mistake and switched to the PCM track, revealing an increased dynamic range and vocal work that's much better balanced. From the start, the film has a lively mix that deftly combines ambience, effects, voices, and score. Listen to fallen leaves as they skitter across suburban sidewalks, to fire crackling ominously in the rear channels, and to the deep LFE quaking of the house as it shifts on its foundation. Channel movements are subtle and effective, especially when the kids are trapped inside the basement of the house. With many animated films, it sounds obvious that the voice actors were stuck inside a studio booth, but Monster House's performance capture tech allowed the filmmakers to record movement and voice simultaneously, and the added physicality really comes across in the film's stellar voice work. Finally, Douglas Pipes' fantastic score is a throwback to big Hollywood orchestration, immersing the film in deep horns and frantic, slithering strings.
Inside Monster House (SD, 24:40 total)
This series of seven behind-the-scenes featurettes is entertaining and complete, covering nearly
every aspect of the film's production. Imaginary Heroes explores some of the early
conceptual artwork of the film, Beginner's Luck shows how fortunate first-time director
Gil Kenan was to nab all of his wish-list actors, and The Best of Friends shows the off-
stage camaraderie that developed between the three young stars. Lots of Dots and
Black Box Theater are where things really start to get interesting though, as both
segments examine the film's extensive use of motion capture technology. It's pretty funny to see
the actors in their wetsuit-like getups, covered with tracking balls—they look like they either just
walked off the set of Tron or they just finished playing a game of laser tag. And last but
not least, Making it Real and Did You Hear That? provide inside looks at the
animation process and the intensive research that went into the sound design. Featuring
interviews with just about everyone involved with the film—with the notable exception of Steven
Spielberg—this is one behind-the-scenes special that's definitely worth watching.
Evolution of a Scene: Eliza vs. Nebbercracker (SD, 20:00)
Director Gil Kenan explains the four-step process of the film's creation, from the extensive,
animated storyboards to the motion capture, virtual camera layouts, and final animated
compositions. Afterward, we get to see the film's opening scene through the raw footage from
each step.
The Art of Monster House (1080p)
Divided into three categories—Conceptual Art, People, and Places and Things—this gallery
contains approximately 170 images, from the earliest sketches to pre-visualization paintings and
photographs of clay models.
Commentary by the Filmmakers
And who are "the filmmakers?" Well, this track never really tells you. Unless you've researched
the film on IMDB or have watched the seven-part "making-of" documentary and can match faces
to voices, you won't have a clue who's talking. Rather than getting all the filmmakers together in
one screening room to discuss the film as a group, this track features snippets from individual
interviews that are cobbled together over the film in a hodgepodge of interesting, but disjointed
information. The speakers are never identified, and the constant hopping from one voice to
another gets tiresome after a while. While there's plenty of info here there's simply too much
cutting and pasting for it to be listenable. You'd be better off watching the exhaustive "Inside
Monster House" documentary.
When I was nine years old I would have loved a film like Monster House, which serves up a great adventure peppered with a few largely innocuous scares. Younger children with a lower tolerance for frightening imagery probably shouldn't watch, but if you've got an older kid who has yet to join the personality-draining ranks of Miley and the Jonas Bros, Monster House is a good bet for some quality, Friday-night family entertainment. Recommended.
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