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The Appropriate Tune: "Monkey Gone To Heaven" by Pixies
It’s unfortunate sometimes that when someone gets popular, they overshadow their peers so completely. Take for example the case of Tim Burton and Henry Selick. Both men had similar starts as animators in Disney pictures like Pete’s Dragon and The Black Cauldron, both men ended up digging on a weird neo-gothic expressionist aesthetic, but because Tim Burton was first past the filmmaking post, it is forever ‘his’ style. Every film that Selick has directed, it is Burton’s name that is the first on people’s lips. Nightmare Before Christmas? Burton. James and the Giant Peach? Burton. Coraline? Burton. It’s enough to drive a man crazy, if he actually cared about any of that, which I doubt he does. So to honor the name of Henry Selick, the man behind some of the most treasured films of my childhood, let’s talk a bit about the least beloved film he’s ever made. A little film called Monkeybone.
Released back in 2001, a year full of surprises, Monkeybone was directed by Henry Selick and written by Sam Hamm, based on the indie comic Dark Town by Kaja Blackley (never knew that until I decided to do this review). Everyone’s favorite actor Brendan Fraser plays Stu Miley, a cartoonist whose creation Monkeybone is on the verge of full-on franchising; Shitty toys, shitty fast food deals, shitty cartoons, the works. Stu doesn’t care about any of that though, all he’s interested in proposing to his girlfriend Julie (Bridget Fonda) and enjoying their lives together. Which he totally would have done, if Stu didn’t immediately get into a car accident and get thrown into a coma. Rather than just, you know, being in a coma however, Stu is instead transported to Downtown, a sort of limbo where those stuck in dreamland hang out alongside figments of the imagination. Figments like Monkeybone, who turns out to be just as annoying in person as he is in cartoon form. Not an ideal situation for poor ol’ Stu, so Hypnos, god of sleep, proposes a little plan: Sneak into the land of Death and grab one of her golden exit passes that ensures a return to the land of the living. Stu accepts, but what he doesn’t know is that this whole situation is a lot more complicated than he realizes. Not to mention scarier.
When discussing this film, Brendan Fraser described it as ‘the most expensive arthouse film he’d ever been in’, or something to that effect. That isn’t apparent at first, but as soon as the movie hits Downtown and the nightmare sequences you see that Selick pulled out all the stops. Costumes, puppets, animatronics, CGI, claymation, it’s everything about Nightmare Before Christmas and Beetlejuice cranked up to eleven. Which I love, having grown up on that Hot Topic shit, and it’s easily the highlight of the film. Probably why it feels like you barely get any of it too, because we’re not allowed to have nice things.
Casting wise it’s also a pretty strong film. Of course there’s Brendan Fraser, who is always fun to see whenever he’s on screen, but you’ve also got Briget Fonda as Julie, John Tuturro as the titular Monkeybone, Dave Foley, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Kattan, and a couple of other names that would be familiar if you watched Comedy Central back in the day. A bit like a Christopher Guest movie; Not a lot of famous faces, but a lot of faces you’ll recognize. I was pleasantly surprised, I have to admit.
It’s certainly not a perfect movie though. The best parts of the film take place near the end of the film, and it doesn’t really start moving until 30-45 minutes in. Not to mention the whole conceit of Downtown, that it’s this place that everyone in a coma goes to and yet no one in the real world has ever corroborated what must be thousands of reports at this point, and there’s never any indication that people lose their memory of it when they wake up either. The relationship between Monkeybone and Stu also feels like the writer taking pages out of the Roger Rabbit playbook, only not as good. Roger was annoying to some degree too but you could understand why he was popular in the context of the film. Monkeybone the character is annoying but never establishes himself as an interesting character beyond that, so he’s just a chore to sit through. Also if the idea is that he’s meant to be an annoying mascot character, a proto-Spongebob if you will, Selick and the writers don’t do that great a job of building the reason WHY he’s so popular. At the beginning of the film when they show the pilot for the potential Monkeybone cartoon, titled Monkeybone, Monkeybone isn’t even in the damn thing, it’s Stu, so where the hell does the monkey even come in? This movie is an hour and 45 minutes long and yet it feels like they left an hour or so on the cutting room floor.
I’ve done a lot of defending of dark fantasy movies over the years on this blog. Return to Oz, Drop Dead Fred, City of Lost Children, and so on and on. Of that particular subgenre, Monkeybone seems the most ambitious but at the same time the most cautious. The ‘darkness’ that we get feels very superficial at times, and by the end we’ve landed into broad, slapstick territory in terms of comedy. I’ve brought up Beetlejuice and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but the most apt comparison is probably The Mask: Both starting life as indie comics before getting put through the Hollywood machine, retaining a piece of what made them great while smoothing things out for mass consumption (certainly the case for the originally hyper-violent Mask). If you had problems with that movie, chances are it’s not going to be all different when it comes to Monkeybone. So it gets the recommendation, but even with that sweet sweet Brendan Fraser action Monkeybone probably isn’t a film you’re going to keep coming back to every Halloween.
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