After a long 5 year wait, Henry Selick's next film, Monkeybone, was finally released. Although a strong dissapointment, Monkeybone delivers some great comedic comedy, the visually beautiful Downtown designed by Henry and some excellent stop-motion animation. The look and tone of the film is very sexual, something not explored in any of Selick's earlier films. Monkeybone, the title character from what I got while watching the film stands for the part of someone that gets aroused sexually and therefore the message at the end of the film `There's a little bit of Monkeybone in everybody' will make sense to those who got some of the subliminal messages. Besides the shock of there being sexual themes in a Selick film, there are some extremely well thought out and created visual effects and stop-motion animation special effects contained in the film. The film combines stop-motion animation and live action to the extent that hasn't been seen or attempted before. With scenes containing compositions between the puppet and the human actor they filmed the stop-motion monkey on a blue screen manaquin which is representing Brendan Fraiser in a scene when he must interact with the monkey. The cast is great- Brendan Fraiser, Bridget Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg and Chris Kattan. The film should have gotten an R rating for all of the sexual material represented in the film throughout but thus was rated PG-13. The editing is terrible and many characters are not introduced. A lot of stop-motion animation and scenes involving the relationship between Stu Miley and Kitty were cut which make scenes left in make little or no sense at all. The film's production was very slow and seemed to be a nightmare. The release date was in limbo for nearly 5 months until a trailer finaly appeared with the film Cast Away. The trailer made the film look like American Pie meets MTV. The film itself is a bit hard to describe. Indeed it does combine films like American Pie and Nightmare on Elm Street and uses the same kind of imagery from the Nightmare Before Christmas. But best of all this is something completely different from the usual brain-dead teen-age comedies that are being made today. It was a box office disaster and a failure to bring something new to screen. As it stands, it is a CULT classic and hopefully will achieve a Rocky Horror-like following sometime in the next 20 years.
Review of Monkeybone
