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Monkeybone

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This article is about the movie Monkeybone. For Monkey Bone (disambiguation), see Monkeybone (disambiguation).
Monkeybone
The movie cover for Monkeybone.
Directed byHenry Selick
Written byKaja Blackley
Sam Hamm
Produced byMichael Barnathan
Mark Radcliffe
StarringBrendan Fraser
Bridget Fonda
Whoopi Goldberg
Rose McGowan
Dave Foley
Thomas Haden Church
Giancarlo Esposito
Chris Kattan
Music byAnne Dudley
Distributed by20th Century Fox
Release date
February 23 2001
Running time
77 min.
LanguageEnglish
Budget$75,000,000 (estimated)

Monkeybone is a 2001 film that combines live-action with stop-motion animation. It was based on Kaja Blackley's graphic novel Dark Town. The movie stars Brendan Fraser, Bridget Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Thomas Haden Church, Rose McGowan, Dave Foley, Giancarlo Esposito & Chris Kattan, and was directed by Henry Selick.

Plot

Stu Miley (Brendan Fraser) is a cartoonist who created a comic strip called Monkeybone which features a rascal monkey. Stu is in love with a sleep institute worker named Dr. Julie McElroy (Bridget Fonda), who helped him deal with his terrible nightmares. She was able to stop the nightmares that Stu had by getting him to change the hand that he drew with. On the night when he is going to propose to her, a freak accident happens and Stu gets into a car accident and falls into a coma. His spirit ends up in Downtown: a purgatory limbo-like existence between life and death. Downtown is a carnival landscape populated by human beings, mythical creatures, and figments of people's imaginations, and where nightmares are entertainment. This is where Monkeybone (voiced by John Turturro) comes to life and stirs up trouble for Stu. Stu befriends a catgirl named Kitty (Rose McGowan), who falls in love with him. When Stu learns that his sister Kimmy (Megan Mullally) is about to pull the plug on his comatose body, he asks Hypnos: The God of Sleep (Giancarlo Esposito) what to do. Hypnos tells Stu that to get back to the living, he has to steal an Exit Pass from Death (Whoopi Goldberg) who lives in the Land of Death. However, Monkeybone and Hypnos have their own agenda with Stu's body when it comes to making nightmares. When Stu steals the Exit Pass, Monkeybone steals it back and leaves Downtown and goes into the Land of the Living in Stu's body. Monkeybone awakes in Stu's body a mere second or so before they are about to unplug him, leaving Stu to figure out how to get his body back from Monkeybone. Hypnos' plan is to use Stu's body to get a substance that Dr. Julie McElroy developed that gives people and animals nightmares.

Graphic novel

The cover of Dark Town.
The cover of Dark Town.

The graphic novel Dark Town, on which Monkeybone is loosely based, was written by Kaja Blackley, illustrated by Vanessa Chong and published by Mad Monkey Press.

The journey from comic to film was initiated by a fan of the novel and member of the San Francisco animation community who, without Blackley’s knowledge, passed a copy of Dark Town onto one of Selick’s producers, Denise Rotina. Henry fell in love with the book and vigourously pursued the rights. In a letter to Kaja he wrote, “I’ve never felt any project was closer to my sensibilities than this one.”

The initial intention was to stay true to the source material which can be seen in early designs from Selick’s company, Twitching Image. However, as the project developed, the end product eventually evolved into Monkeybone.

Influences

  • The painting supposedly drawn by Stu before undergoing therapy is very similar to The Birth, by Mark Ryden. Much of the film's art bears a strong resemblance to that of Ryden—for example, the bust of Abraham Lincoln as "The Great Emancipator"; however Ryden is not credited.
  • The opening sequence in which Stu first encounters Monkeybone is very similar to the work of Swedish cartoonist Magnus Carlsson. Carlsson animated the video clip Paranoid Android by Radiohead which starred his character Robin. The animation style and the themes from this sequence are strikingly similar to that of Carlsson.

Cast

NOTE: In the Monkeybone webisodes on BiteMyMonkey.com, Wally Wingert provides the voice of Monkeybone.

See also

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