Jung and old-school

>> Henry Selick's Monkeybone is a mixed bag

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

A lot of the hype around Monkeybone, the new film from director Henry Selick (Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach), draws immediate comparisons to Ralph Bakshi's '80s item Cool World. An adult response to its predecessor Roger Rabbit, Cool World had a live-action Brad Pitt tossed into a dark and sleazy cartooniverse. Fart jokes notwithstanding, Monkeybone is also an adult-oriented episode of live-action meets animation, except that Selick drops star Brendan Fraser into a world of every form of animation except traditional cell-style.

"It's my predilection to kinda mix things up," says Selick, who applies computer tricks, puppetry, straight-ahead costumes and his speciality, stop-motion animation. The result is paradoxical. A film in a single style of animation, particularly old-fashioned stop-motion, quickly loses its sheen and produces something like a soldier's thousand-yard stare in the viewer, who scans the backgrounds for details compromising the illusion. "You can lose the miracle and just start looking at the flaws," concurs Selick.

Monkeybone's mixed bag, on the other hand, relaxes the cynicism muscle, in the same way Pee-Wee's Playhouse once did. It's all just eye candy, kid.

The monkey's uncle

Monkeybone's evolutionary roots are found in Dark Town, an incomplete comic series by Canadians Kaja Blackley and Vanessa Chong. "It found its way to my office in San Francisco in '96," recalls Selick. "There was a graphic style and a story, or at least the bare bones of one, that were very gripping."

In it, a comatose puppeteer finds himself in a creepy, puppet-populated purgatory. "Our hero learns that the plug is about to be pulled, so he tries to find a way back to his life. The clock is ticking--there were going to be 11 more issues, each representing an hour, but they were never created. Kaja hadn't really worked out what they were going to be."

That was left to Selick and Samm Hamm, who had previously written Batman screenplays drenched in Jungian symbolism--a theme that resurfaces throughout Monkeybone. "Downtown," the film's alternate reality, is really the coma patient's unconscious.

"Along the way, we turned the hero into a cartoonist and kept him as a live-action character in the other world, while his alter-ego, his cartoon creation, came to life as a bad merchandise thing who ultimately stabs him in the back. Making him a cartoonist gave us a character to bring to life, to represent the other, repressed half of his personality."

The wretched sock puppet may be the titular character, but the real payoff, in the aforementioned eye-candy department, is the myriad denizens of Downtown. "Hey, there used to be a lot more," exclaims Selick. "You'll see them on the DVD! Our idea behind it, although it's not that important to the story, is that the creatures who work in Downtown are like characters at Disneyland, only they're mythological figures that nobody believes in anymore. You get a minotaur named Bull running the bar. You get Larry the Llama, the street sweeper, who bears a strong resemblance to a certain cigarette mascot who's been forcibly retired. There's other references to advertising icons, a few very obscure historical gods--the little golden messenger is Subramansa, a Babylonian god." There's also hottie Rose McGowan as a catgirl waitress, an unconfirmed cameo by Stephen King and a tribute to Ymir, the famous cyclops created by stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen.

Live and let dynamate

Selick's proud of the painstaking precision that went into the animation, but confesses it was often a relief to shoot the simple live-action "real-world" moments. "It was enormous fun to shoot a sequence like the one with comedian Chris Kattan merely running away from a gang of surgeons, because he's so much fun to watch, and you're not dealing with any special effects at all."

Championing the archaic medium of stop-motion in C.G.-obsessed Hollywood is, Selick admits, an increasingly uphill battle. "You can find a lot more computer animators and get things done a lot more quickly, and stop-motion is definitely not appropriate for many, many things that C.G. is. Our excuse was story-based, in this case, for the monkey which was supposed to be a bad toy come to life. In a normal film, where you're trying to convince people that the film is real, stop-motion doesn't make much sense. C.G. does it better--dinosaurs, dragons, giant storms and morphing monsters.

"Stop-motion will be used less and less as something to mix with live-action, although there will be the occasional film where it makes sense, where crude animation might be useful, not chrome-plated and super-lubed, which is what computer animation looks like to me."

Monkeybone opens Friday, Feb. 23