Monster House (2006) (with Jane Batkin)

Chris and Alex delve into motion-capture, murder mystery, and monster houses for this discussion of Gil Kenan’s 2006 computer-animated film Monster House, a digital feature produced by the ImageMovers company founded by renowned filmmaker Robert Zemeckis and a specialist in animation utilising mo-cap technologies. Joining them for Episode 121 of the podcast is Dr Jane Batkin, an animation film theorist and Associate Professor in the School of Film, Media and Journalism at the University of Lincoln. Her book Identity in Animation: A Journey into Self, Difference, Culture and the Body was published in 2017, and she has had various chapters in edited collections on animation, including a recent piece on childhood wandering in Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio Laika’s Stop Motion Witchcraft (2021). Jane is currently working on a monograph on childhood in animated film and television and gained a British Academy Award for research in August 2022 for her project entitled “The Secret Space of Childhood in Animated and Live Action Cinema: Performance, Preservation and Metaphor.” Topics in this instalment include the production context for Monster House and the question of child labour; the uncanniness of children-in-performance and what it means for a child to be viewed as ‘acting’ vs. ‘being’; the digital rendering of surfaces and textures and the film’s ‘puppetlike’ character designs; computer animation and nostalgia, and whether it is possible to be nostalgic for CGI; the ‘body’ of animated homes and psycho-architectural spaces via the film’s proximity to the horror genre; and how Monster House’s negotiation of adulthood positions Kenan’s computer-animated feature as a ‘Sirkian’ melodrama for children. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**