MONSTER HOUSE

  

Monster House is a 2006 animated feature length film for a middle grade audience. The script was written by  Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab. Monster House is already 12 years old, but the animation still looks pretty good. It was animated at a time when actors were just starting to be used as models, which is why this looks better than The Polar Express. The one thing significantly improved by modern processing power is hair. Inability to depict hair and skin is why Pixar decided to make their first animated film about toys. The hair on the characters of Monster House looks plastic, like you get on a 1980s Ken Doll, compared to what you see in, say, Brave, of 2012, in which hair is almost a character in its own right.

Monster House sticks to some of the oldest, most tried and true horror film tropes but just kind of toned down, and in cartoon form. At the beginning we hear D.J’s mom say that it’s just puberty, and he’s just maturing. But his friend Chowder seems to represents immaturity and being a child, whereas Jenny represents maturity, and the house represents his denial or trouble in maturing. So at the end when he destroys the house he is mature, after destroying the house he is with his friends and Nevercracker giving out presents, getting rid of more of his immaturity, but then we see that he wants to go trick-or-treating. Chowder and Jenny are extreme cases of immaturity (Chowder) and maturity (Jenny) but we see D.J. learning to balance maturity and immaturity, still enjoying things like a child, but still acting like more of an adult.

A suburban home has become physically animated by a vengeful human soul looking to stir up trouble from beyond the grave, and it's up to three adventurous kids from the neighborhood to do battle with the structural golem in this comically frightful tale, directed by Gil Kenan and featuring the voices of Steve Buscemi, Nick Cannon, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Kevin James. DJ Harvard (voice of Mitchel Musso) lives directly across the street from a most unusual house. A malevolent entity that longs to feed on the energy of the living, the once peaceful house that looms ominously outside of DJ's bedroom window would like nothing more than the chance to feast on the children of the neighborhood. As Halloween begins to draw near and the children of the neighborhood prepare for another long night of trick-or-treating, it appears as if it may be the house that is in for the biggest treat of all. Now, with the adults turning a deaf ear to DJ's strange findings, it's up to the brave young boy and his faithful friends Chowder (voice of Sam Lerner) and Jenny (Spencer Locke) to break through the barrier of the supernatural and defeat the powers of darkness before the house grows too powerful to fight.

The film technique that use in this movie is extreme close up. Extreme close up was shown at the start of the movie when DJ went to go fetch Chower’s basketball off Nebbercracker’s lawn. When suddently Nebbercracker ran outside and picked DJ up and started yelling at him and waving him above his head. Then there was an extreme close up on Nebbercracker’s eyes, and we could see the anger and the fear. The extreme close up was effective because it showed us in more detail about how Nerbbercracker was feeling. The diegetic sound is also one of the film technique in this movie. The diegetic sound was shown throughout the movie. It was shown when things started to get spooky or enthusiastic. Diegetic sound was also effective because it gave each scene or every time it was played more of a mood and it told the audience of how to feel. This film monster house had a lot of genres such as fantasy, comedy, mystery, animation, creature film, shildren’s fantasy, haunted house film, family film and so on. Monster House had a century of cinematic history behind it. That was 100 years of two dimensional motion picture photography, with all its limitations, and all the visual devices which were invented to surmount those limitations that rack focuses, flattened-out zoom effects, staccato shutter effects like the ones showcased in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Monster House copies all these techniques and more. That it applies them to such a well-worn story is part of its innovation that it turns the movie into a kind of meta-filmmaking, something that might make an imaginary meta-director that like the one Pauline Kael saw in Brian De Palma that ecstatic and gleeful.

In conclusion, the film Monster House is a thrill-ride tale about three kids who must do battle with a mysterious home that is determined to eat every trick or treater in sight on Halloween. The Monster House videogames allow players to experience key moments of the movie as all three playable characters from the film as they explore the house room by room, while also taking on unique adventures that were inspired by the film.