A young man’s game

TO understand the brash, blitzkrieg humor of “Monster House,” the new comic horror film that opens Friday, it’s helpful to know that Gil Kenan, the film’s 29-year-old first-time director, came to America from Israel at age 7, already half aware that pop culture is the great equalizer. Having arrived in Reseda fresh from the suburbs of Tel Aviv, Kenan knew that as the immigrant kid with a thick accent, he needed to hit the ground running in his new world.

“As an immigrant, you have to compensate somehow for your native headdress by impressing -- you have to work extra hard to get noticed or be taken seriously,” he told me the other day, sitting in an office at Sony, the studio that bankrolled “Monster House.” “I was shameless. When I’d hear the girls in school talking about the latest episode of ‘Silver Spoons,’ I’d always say, ‘Oh, yeah, I saw that.’ ”

At age 7, thanks to his dad, he already had an encyclopedic knowledge of outrageous British humor. So when he had a sleepover with a bunch of other 7-year-olds, Kenan brought a copy of “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life,” a movie filled with ribald humor about condoms and Catholics, buckets of vomit, an exploding fat man and an elaborate production number about sperm.

“The other parents were so horrified,” Kenan recalls, not without a hint of pride, “that they made my parents come pick me up and take me home.”

Some audiences may react to the noisy antics of “Monster House” about the same way that parents did to Kenan’s Python screening. (And some parents are likely to feel the film is too intense for young children, despite its PG rating.) For me, it was a visual delight to see a house that, thanks to the magic of motion-capture animation, could leap from its moorings and gobble up everyone who steps foot in its yard. Ain’t It Cool News’ Harry Knowles enthusiastically wrote that “Monster House” was his favorite film of the summer. But Variety complained about the “ear-splitting sound effects,” dismissing the film as “desensitizing,” saying “the overriding impression is assaultive to a progressively off-putting degree.”

Many critics said the same thing about “The Polar Express,” the pioneering 2004 motion-capture film from Robert Zemeckis, who also served as Kenan’s godfather in getting “Monster House” made. “Polar Express” went on to gross $172 million in the U.S. alone. But for critics like The Times’ Kenneth Turan, the film felt like “loud music at the wrong party,” offering “sequences of such exhausting, turbocharged jeopardy that it seems like we’ve wandered into a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.”

As someone who counts among his filmic influences “The Shining,” “Time Bandits” and “Nightmare on Elm Street,” Kenan thinks critics have lost touch with their childhood. “Horror movies are supposed to be thrill park rides,” he says. “It’s supposed to be a visceral, intense experience, not a passive one. The whole power of a scary movie is the feeling of not being in control. To call my film desensitizing -- I defy you to find anyone who’s under 15 who’d agree with that.”

Kenan grins. “Look at ‘Time Bandits.’ All the parts I really remember are the ones that really scared the hell out of me.”

While it’s too early to tell if 15-year-olds will flock to see “Monster House,” the film marks another big step forward in the explosion of creativity from the world of animation. Much of the attention has justifiably gone to Pixar, which has delivered an amazing string of both artistic and commercial blockbusters. But animation has enjoyed a renaissance in other areas, including the dazzling hand-drawn animation of Hayao Miyazaki (“Howl’s Moving Castle”), the eccentric clay animation of Nick Park (“Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit”), the rotoscoping of Richard Linklater’s “A Scanner Darkly” and the eye-popping computer animation in “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Chronicles of Narnia” that gives those films a visual intensity beyond anything imaginable in traditional live action.

It is no coincidence that a host of gifted younger filmmakers has turned to animation for upcoming projects, including Spike Jonze, who’s doing Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” and Wes Anderson, who’s at work on Roald Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” And, of course, TV has been flooded with clever comedy-based animation for years, from “The Simpsons,” “South Park” and “Family Guy” to a host of cult-favorite Adult Swim shows on the Cartoon Network.

“Ten years ago, most animation was either stop-motion puppets, which were rarely seen, or hand-drawn animation, which only existed at Disney and in anime,” says Jerry Beck, who’s written extensively about animation, both in books and on his blog, Cartoonbrew. “But now we have a whole generation of computer animators as well as live-action people who are invading animation in ways we’ve never seen before. It’s definitely a second Golden Age.”

Led by Pixar and DreamWorks with its “Shrek” franchise, animation films have become the most reliable box-office vehicles in today’s business. So far this year there have been five major- studio animated family films. Three of them -- “Ice Age 2: The Meltdown,” “Over the Hedge” and “Cars” -- have been huge hits. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do the math -- when 60% of such films are hits, you’ve struck gold.

As you might expect, the studio projects don’t have especially high artistic ambitions. In fact, if you’ve ever taken your kid to one animated film and sat through the trailers for the coming features, you know that the stories (Pixar films excepted) are basically knockoffs of one essential theme: A likable animal (rat, carefree cow, fast-talking mule or penguin -- all lead characters in upcoming animated studio films) goes off on a madcap adventure.

Nonetheless, the films are huge moneymakers for studios, since unlike most live-action films, they rarely have any profit participants and the voice talent comes cheap. The animation process is especially attractive to studio executives, since the film is really made in post-production, allowing executives all the time in the world to suggest changes in various sequences. The films often travel extraordinarily well overseas, in part because they can be dubbed with local talent, allowing each country to lay a cultural claim to the film.

“Unlike a lot of other movie genres, animation speaks a universal language,” says Columbia Pictures Chairman Amy Pascal. “The stories are simple and classic and in a funny way you can suspend disbelief in these stories in a way you can’t in ‘Miami Vice.’ These movies also speak the visceral language of our age. Nobody believes long drawn-out arguments anymore, so animation feels especially vital in the way that an editorial cartoon can cut to the truth more effectively than a 15-page news story.”

“Monster House” almost didn’t make it off the drawing board. It was originally in development at DreamWorks but was put into turnaround. Eager to be in business with Zemeckis, Pascal jumped at the chance to make the movie. Normally a studio would be nervous about giving a $75-million movie to an untested rookie like Kenan. It certainly appeared like a big leap for a kid fresh out of UCLA film school whose last film had been a $400 short he made in the kitchen of his Westwood apartment.

However, with Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg serving as the film’s executive producers, the studio felt it had a secure safety net. Zemeckis declined to be interviewed -- he’s still smarting over the rocky reception he got during the release of “Polar Express.” But “Monster House” couldn’t have been made without him.

“This was his baby,” says Pascal. “I didn’t have a single creative meeting without him. Bob isn’t afraid of how technology is going to change our world. He says we’re all going to be watching movies on our watches, so why fight it. He’s always breaking barriers, whether it’s having a guy to talk to a soccer ball in ‘Cast Away’ or creating a whole new animated genre with ‘Roger Rabbit.’ ”

Motion-capture animation is still in its infancy, but it seems ripe with artistic possibility. The process involves using 200 infrared sensors to record the movements of actors wearing black wetsuits with reflective markers in a black-box-style soundstage. “It’s a film shoot deconstructed,” Kenan says. “You shoot the performances first, then do the camerawork and editing afterwards.”

For a young filmmaker like Kenan, having a seasoned veteran around was invaluable. “Bob is filled with insight and enthusiasm,” says Kenan. “What I really learned from him is that so many questions I had could be answered by asking, ‘What story am I telling?’ It’s a magical question that opens a lot of doors.”

For Kenan, it couldn’t be a more exciting time to be working in animation, since America seems to finally be discovering what the rest of the world has known for years -- that animation isn’t simply something to pacify kids in the back of a minivan.

Whether it’s motion capture or anime, animation expands the universe of storytelling.

“It allows impossible things to appear possible on screen,” says Kenan. “You can go places that you can’t go with live action. We still start with a script -- and we had a really good one -- but animation lets me use my voice to expand its possibilities. It’s like reading a novel and illustrating it in your head.”

“The Big Picture” runs each Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.