Monster House

Directed by: Gil Kenan
Voiced by: Mitchel Musso, Sam Lerner, Spencer Locke, Steve Buscemi, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jason Lee, Kevin James, Nick Cannon, Catherine O'Hara, Fred Willard, Jon Heder, Kathleen Turner
Running Time: 1h 31min

Dreamworks outdoes Pixar this summer, by offering the best animated feature of the year. Monster House is cool for kids, yet certain to be a hit with grown-ups. It manages to strike a chord with children by inhabiting the world they live in, full of creepy old men living in haunted houses, while at the same time, offering up enough scares and laughs to keep any 30 year old kid at heart thoroughly entertained.

The animation is nothing short of inspired, as the motion capture technology truly breathes life into the CGI animation. Facial expressions, "camera angles" and "tracking shots" are planned with painstaking detail; it's truly a sight to behold. You'll forget you're watching a 'cartoon' right from the fluttering leaf of the opening credits.

Not content to stop there, the filmmakers have added to the superb animation with equally superb writing and a cast to deliver those lines. Familiar voices (see the above credits) fill the adult characters with a lot of humour, even though each adult is given only about 5 minutes of screen time. Each actor does a lot with their 5 minutes, completely deserving of their pay check. The clever casting of Jon Heder makes this the first film to get full dynamite for his cameo, as he fits in perfectly as an arcade legend.

Still, with all this going for it, Monster House would have failed if its child roles didn't measure up. Fortunately, the three leads steal the show, aptly performing voice work that stretches from childhood tomfoolery to ghastly terror to puppy love, all within the same scene. Their honest approach to the scripts' clever and accurate depiction of children almost too old for trick or treating, yet not quite old enough to forget the bogeyman, makes this a film that will certainly become a perennial Halloween favourite. I know I could watch it a thousand times over.

Grade: A