This old house: Imageworks uses performance capture and hand animation to create 'dollhouse' realism.(Sony Pictures Imageworks)

Any animator who has spent months sculpting blendshapes or posing IK handles will tell you that the phrase "computer animation" is not only a misnomer for the person's art, but a borderline insult. Computers don't animate anything; people do. One of the reasons for the misconception is that digital characters usually lack the hands-on tangibility that makes stop-motion puppets feel handcrafted and unique. It's this handmade charm and tactile reality of stop motion that first-time director Gil Kenan, hacked by executive producers Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, wanted to introduce to the CG medium in Sony Pictures Imageworks' latest feature, Monster House.

Kenan wanted the digital characters to feel as though human hands had labored on them, even if it meant preserving the fingerprints the sculptor left in the clay maquettes from which they were scanned. "I wanted the audience to feel like it could relate to every character in every environment by reaching out and touching them, so that meant devising an entirely new approach to putting together a computer generated movie," says the 29-year old director, who has spent the last four years living every aspiring filmmaker's dream (see "Building a Career, pg. 46).

Kenan was fresh out of film school at UCLA when his short movie "The Lark" was noticed by Zemeckis; along with Spielberg, Zemeckis had opted against developing Monster House as a live-action film because the anthropomorphizing Monster House in question could only be brought to life through animation. And they needed a director who could handle the challenges of animation and directing the partially motion captured performances of the CG characters. Kenan's "The Lark," which featured a stop-motion bird and rotoscoped live actors performing against 2D animated backgrounds made in Adobe's After Effects, earned him the job. Not bad for a film shot on DV and edited in Apple's Final Cut for a mere $400.

Monster House utilizes the same performance-capture system pioneered for 2004's The Polar Express (see "Locomotion," December 2004, pg. 16), which lent itself perfectly to capturing the weight and physicality of the characters. Unlike The Polar Express, however, Monster House's world is far more stylized, blending the childlike elements of Rankin/Bass with the stop-motion work of Ray Harryhausen (Clash of the Titans) to forge a kind of "dollhouse" realism in which characters feel more doll-like than CG creations.

The story follows a boy named DJ (played by Mitchel Musso) who is obsessed with a mysterious house across the street that is owned by the meanest old man in the neighborhood, Horace Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi). When DJ and his friend Chowder (Saul Lerner) try to recover their basketball from Nebbercracker's lawn, the old man goes berserk, lifting DJ off the ground before collapsing dead on top of him. That's when the house comes alive, devouring anyone and anything that comes its way. DJ and Chowder do their best to alert those living nearby, but their warnings fall on deaf ears, namely those of Zee (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the world's worst baby-sitter, her apathetic headbanger boyfriend Bones (Jason Lee), and two witless police officers. It's up to DJ, Chowder, and a prep-schooler named Jenny (Spencer Locke) to save the neighborhood.

Stop-Motion CGI

In an era when CG characters can boast millions of volumetric hairs and scenes can be rendered with hundreds of lights, Kenan's plan to never let the computer's "inhuman" ability to process data defeat the human connection to the film was bold and audacious, and had repercussions throughout the production. "In my first conversation with my visual effects supervisor, Jay Redd, we decided to remove motion blur from the entire movie," says Kenan. "Motion blur has been used as a crutch in CG animation for so long, and what you lose is that amazing Harryhausen staccato effect, where things have a real connection to the ground, and a real weight and gravity to them. I want everything to feel planted and tangible and connected to the world."