The Brothers Grimm would have loved this film.
Director Henry Selick’s newest stop-motion fantasy is gleefully, grotesquely ghoulish: full-tilt macabre and disturbing at a level that absolutely warrants its PG-13 rating. (Parents, take note.)
But while the film looks fantastic, it’s somewhat over-written, with at least one sub-plot too many, and a tendency to short-change supporting characters who deserve more exposure. The clumsy script is by Selick and Jordan Peele, based on an unpublished book by Selick and Clay McLeod Chapman.
While her sorta-kinda friend Raúl watches nervously, Kat prepares to have a close
encounter with something rather unpleasant.
A fleeting prologue lasts just long enough to introduce 8-year-old Kat Elliot, who immediately loses her parents in a tragic car accident, for which she blames herself. (Bad enough that so many Disney films, animated or otherwise, feature characters who lose one parent; this poor girl loses both?)
Before we can wonder about Kat’s subsequent fate, we’re whisked to a cacophonous underworld setting, where an immense demon named Buffalo Belzer (voiced by Ving Rhames) has built a crazy-quilt amusement park for despondent lost souls on his massive chest. His two much smaller sons, Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and Wild (Peele), spend eternity by applying dollops of rejuvenating hair cream on Belzer’s balding pate … all the while dreaming of building their own, vastly superior amusement park for the dear departed.
(Amusement parks for the dead? On a demon’s chest? Seriously? No wonder Selick and Chapman haven’t been able to sell their book.)
Time leaps ahead in the surface world. Kat (Lyric Ross), now a defiant, punk rock-loving 13-year-old, has endured the worst of the foster care system; she’s brought back to her home town — in shackles — for her “last-chance placement” at the local all-girls Catholic school. She’s shocked to see that her beloved community of Rust Bank is a sorry shadow of itself; her parents’ brewery burned to the ground shortly after their demise, and most homes and storefronts are barricaded, with ugly “Klax Korp” posters warning people not to trespass.
Kat’s sullen attitude doesn’t dent the chirpy greeting from the school’s preppy “RBC Girls”: Siobhan (Tamara Smart), Sweetie (Ramona Young) and Sloane (Seema Virdi), accompanied by their adorable pet goat. They want to become instant BFFs; Kat wants no part of them. She’s a bit more tolerant of Raúl (Sam Zelaya), a quiet, artistic trans lad who has turned the school attic into a well-appointed studio workshop.
The school is run by Father Bests (James Hong) and Sister Helley (Angela Bassett), with assistance from a couple of squat, forever scowling nuns dubbed Penguins (old joke, right?).
What’s left of the community has thus far managed to prevent the arrogant, filthy-rich Lane and Irmgard Klaxon (David Harewood and Maxine Peake) from razing the remains of Rust Bank, in order to build another of their high-tech prisons. (It quickly becomes clear that this greedy, grasping couple is much more evil than any of the underworld demons.)
Meanwhile, Wendell and Wild have discovered that the rejuvenating hair cream can bring dead ticks back to life (said ticks being a culinary treat). Wanting to test the cream on something larger, the demon brothers lament their inability to visit the surface world, where any cemetery would be laden with bodies.
An otherwise ordinary classroom session goes awry when Kat’s hand is marked with what appears to be a skull; Sister Helley, her expression grave, cautions the girl not to tell anybody about it.
Ah, but that marking identifies Kat as a “hell maiden,” which allows Wendell and Wild to invade her dreams, and implant instructions for a spell that’ll allow them to visit the surface world … where, in addition to finding a suitable corpse, they hope to raise gobs of money for their planned amusement park.
(What, the poor girl doesn’t already have enough trouble? And again, the amusement park? And since when do demons need money?)
By this point, you’re correct to assume that all of this is an increasingly absurd information dump … and I haven’t even mentioned the school’s creepy janitor, Manberg (Igal Naor), who has a most unusual hobby.
To be fair, with various levels of good and evil now established, the rest of the story proceeds in relatively straightforward fashion. Once Kat learns of the hair cream, she naturally wants Wendell and Wise to use it on her parents. But it’s never wise to bargain with demons, and let’s just say that — when one dabbles in reviving the dead — things get seriously out of hand.
Fans of The Nightmare before Christmas and Corpse Bride will recognized this territory, although Selick and Peele are more inclined to stray across the borders of good taste.
The backgrounds and model work are superb, and all of the stop-motion characters are cleverly — often hilariously — realized. We quickly warm to Kat, despite her cold aloofness; she’s obviously a child in pain … and yes, her nuanced emotions are conveyed here just as effectively, as would be the case with a flesh-and-blood actress.
Hong’s wheedling, whiny voice is just right for Father Bests, whose actions soon become somewhat less than God-fearing. Irmgard Klaxon is a fright-mask terror: an exaggerated, lipstick-smeared villainess even more horrific than Disney’s Cruella DeVille. Siobhan’s angelic, wide-eyed appearance is perfectly matched by Smart’s relentlessly jovial line deliveries.
It’s a shame we don’t get to know Sloane and Sweetie equally well; Virdi and Young are somewhat short-changed.
The best running visual gag concerns Manberg, who apparently lost both feet in some earlier contretemps; his wheelchair footrests are occupied by two lifelike fake bare feet.
No surprise, Key and Peele turn Wendell and Wild into a snarky double act, with one-liners and petulant ripostes flying furiously back and forth.
Bruno Coulais’ appropriately spooky score is too frequently buried beneath the shrieking punk rock tunes blasting from Kat’s beloved retro boom box.
Everything resolves in a fairly reasonable manner, even if the journey proves chaotic; it’s a shame to see such impressive animation somewhat wasted on an uneven script.
Do hang around for all of the end credits, which reveal snippets of the painstaking, behind-the-scenes animation work. And there’s also a clever little cut-scene after the credits conclude.
No comments:
Post a Comment