If you’ve ever seen The Nightmare Before Christmas or Coraline, you already know that director Henry Selick is a genius. In the art form of stop-motion animated films, he is without equal. That said, 25 years ago, Selick took a crack at directing a primarily live-action film with stop-motion elements (plus puppetry and computer effects), and made a movie so bad and annoying that I’d rather exchange my eyes for buttons, or get strapped to Oogie Boogie’s torture machine, than ever watch it again.
Monkeybone is about a cartoonist named Stu Miley (Brendan Fraser) whose comic book character Monkeybone is about to get an animated series. He isn’t too thrilled about it, though, because he’s being overwhelmed with merchandising opportunities that don’t interest him. He’s also about to propose to his girlfriend Julie (Bridget Fonda), but his plans go sideways when a car accident puts him into a coma.
While Stu is comatose, his soul enters Down Town, a place populated by people in limbo and various creatures and mythical beings. Among them is Monkeybone (John Turturro), Stu’s famous character, a horny, rascally scamp of a cartoon monkey who quickly begins to annoy the crap out of his creator. Eventually, Stu finds out he can return to his body if he gets an exit pass from the land of the dead, so he and Monkeybone go there and snag one. But when it’s time to turn the exit pass in, Monkeybone jumps ahead of Stu and submits it himself, putting himself into Stu’s now-awakened body in the real world.
From there, we follow Monkeybone-as-Stu in the real world, as he does all kinds of things Stu never would, like sign every merchandising deal he can, and chase any woman he lays eyes on. To stop Monkeybone, Stu gets some help from Death (Whoopi Goldberg), who likes Stu because of his comic. Death puts Stu into the body of a reanimated corpse (Chris Kattan) to stop Monkeybone.
Before getting into what’s wrong with this movie, let me say that there’s a lot to like about it. First of all, Monkeybone is a great-looking character, especially when he’s rendered in Selick’s signature stop-motion. The look of Down Town is also great: It’s a strange, hand-shaped floating island in the middle of darkness, with a vibrant world on the palm which is really trippy and cool, much like the worlds from Selick’s other, better movies.
There are also two really standout performances in this movie, from Giancarlo Esposito and Chris Kattan. Esposito, in a pre-Breaking Bad role, plays Hypnos, the God of Sleep and the ruler of Down Town. He’s a half-goat creature, and the mix of live-action actor for the top half and stop-motion goat legs for the bottom half is impressive and convincing. As for Kattan, he plays a gymnast who died of a broken neck: When Stu inhabits his corpse, it revives while doctors are removing his organs. He then runs off with the organ-hunting doctors (led by Bob Odenkirk) in pursuit, and even chucks his remaining organs at them to thwart them. Honestly, the whole idea here is inventive and funny, but the best part is Kattan’s head-flopping physicality as a dead man whose neck was snapped.
So what’s wrong with this movie? First of all, it’s irritating from every angle. Monkeybone is a chattery, horny little monkey who’s incredibly hyper and always talking, but none of the material given to him is particularly funny. In that way, he’s a lot like Beetlejuice, another lascivious supernatural chatterbox. But director Tim Burton and his writers smartly limit Beetlejuice’s screen time in Beetlejuice, making his scenes seem weirder and hit harder. Monkeybone is around a lot more once the action moves to Down Town, and his antics constantly fall flat, which makes him a lot, without actually being any fun to watch. John Turturro is also doing a grating cartoony voice, which is a total miscast.
Also agonizing in the film is Brendan Fraser. I know we’re all happy that Fraser is back and making movies again, but let’s not forget he made some real stinkers in his day. When Monkeybone is inhabiting Stu’s body, all that unfunny horniness is acted out by a screeching, soul patch-wearing Fraser who’s often embarrassingly awkward to watch. Also, he’s supposed to be a living cartoon character, yet much of his acting even before his possession is over-the-top, with a lot of exaggerated mugging for the camera, so the contrast between Stu and Monkeybone-as-Stu isn’t nearly as pronounced as it should be.
The direction in this movie also makes it painfully clear that Selick was just not comfortable working in live-action. While the majority of Down Town has the same precise direction of his stop-motion work, his live-action scenes are unfocused and overreliant on broad characters to jazz them up. These scenes are slow-paced and seem desperate for laughs. There’s a particular scene where all these people are trying to get their hands on an exit pass, and the ensuing fight feels slow, fake, and weirdly distant, like Selick didn’t know how to capture the energy and action he wanted to convey.
Finally, the biggest issue overall is the story. Monkeybone has a strange mix of incredibly imaginative production design and painfully derivative ideas about what to do with it. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is an obvious influence, especially in the attempted Stu/Monkeybone dynamic and the mix of stop-motion and live-action. The moments where that mixture looks great on-screen are far too brief: Mostly, Down Town has Stu interacting with Star Wars-like puppets. What would have been great is seeing him in a fully stop-motion world, or even bringing stop-motion Monkeybone into the real world, but the movie never gets that ambitious.
Even more pronounced than the Who Framed Roger Rabbit influence, though is, as mentioned above, the feeling that Selick was trying to make his own version of Beetlejuice, at the time one of the biggest hits from Selick’s Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach collaborator Tim Burton. With all of Monkeybone’s talk of life, death, and the space between, and Down Town having more than a passing resemblance to the waiting area of the afterlife in Beetlejuice, it’s clear that Selick was trying to explore the same space. But it was never clear what he was trying to say. Beetlejuice carries the usual Burton messages about a lonely outsider accepting their own oddity as a superpower, and the Alec Baldwin/Geena Davis plotline seems to be about the gradual acceptance of death. In Monkeybone, Brendan Fraser just goes on an afterlife adventure, then emerges back on Earth alive and unscathed.
The most frustrating thing about Monkeybone is the movie’s obvious potential. Down Town really is as good a set piece as anything in Selick’s best work, and the idea of a cartoon character taking control of a human body could be great, given an actor who can pull it off without getting obnoxious. This story also needed a lot of funny, tightly crafted jokes and set pieces, and the screenplay, written by Sam Hamm (who wrote Tim Burton’s Batman movies) just doesn’t have that level of humor.
Finally there’s Monkeybone, a character whose artistic design is so strong, he could have been as iconic as Jack Skellington. (Or at least the mayor of Halloween Town.) And yet his personality is so loathsome that even his own creator hates him. If Stu Miley doesn’t like Monkeybone, why should we?
Monkeybone is available for rental on Prime Video, Apple TV, and Youtube.
