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Monkeybone is directed by Henry Sellick,
who also directed a movie I really enjoy and a movie I despise:
Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the
Giant Peach. Both of those movies are primarily done with stop-motion
animation, a painstaking process that takes days to film a few
seconds of footage. Monkeybone is a movie that is live-action,
but contains a supporting character that is stop-motion animated.
Contrary to what you read on the posters, Monkeybone is not the
first live-action movie that has actors and stop-motion animated
figures in the same scene together-the classic film Jason and
the Argonauts had such scenes in the skeleton sequence, as did
other movies before or since then. Monkeybone involves Brendan
Fraser as an animator who falls into a coma and goes to two dream
worlds of sorts. One of them is kind of a limbo area, the other
is the Land of Death, ruled by Whoopi Goldberg. While David Foley,
Fraser's manager in the real world, tries to sell merchandise
from his new cartoon, some wacky stuff happens and Fraser comes
out of the coma possessed by Monkeybone. Chris Katann shows up
for the neat finale. Monkeybone could have been a lot worse.
When I say a lot worse, I mean like Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
bad. Some of the jokes work, Brendan Fraser isn't half bad, and
the set design and costumes are fabulous. While Tim Burton had
nothing to do with this movie, it's obvious Henry Sellick is
influenced by Burton's art style in some of the sets. The supporting
actors, David Foley and Chris Katann, steal the show. Whoopi
Goldberg is awful in her part as Death, but I don't know what
actor could have made the part better (OK, maybe Elvira or Christina
Ricci). Monkeybone is OK, but could have been better. I went into Monkeybone thinking that it would be a cool idea for a movie, that didn't quite translate well onto the screen, much like the majority of comicbook movies. I was surprised to see that it didn't suck as much as I had expected. I'm not saying it was great or anything, but it could have been worse. The directing was good, and the scenery was fantastic. My favorite part of the movie, was the last chase sequence with Chris Kattan and Brendan Fraser. Although I usually can't stand Whoopi Goldberg, she was as unbearable in this as she tends to be. **1/2 out of **** |