They've created a nightmare comic strip world that's half Gothic horror, half tiki lounge. There are stunning shots of the comatose Stu deflating like a balloon or being absorbed into one of his drawings. As Stu slips into a coma he descends into his hospital stretcher until Julie is hovering above him as if she were calling down from the top of a cliff. There are grim reapers in intricately folded shrouds that look as if Issey Miyake has gone into designing Halloween costumes. The details and jokes pile up, zip and ping through the background with the suddenness of the sound effects in a Looney Tune.
Nothing seems too wild for the filmmakers to try.
Often, before you can laugh, you have to pause for a millisecond and register the outrageousness of what you're seeing. From now on, when your dog whimpers and shakes in his sleep, you'll have nothing but sympathy for his nightmares. The first half of the movie is such a sustained feat of imaginatively ghoulish wit that when Monkeybone returns to Earth, waking Stu from his coma and taking over his body, I kept waiting for the movie to go splat. That it doesn't is a tribute to both Hamm and Selick's sure fix on their material and also to Brendan Fraser. There's always been something vaguely simian about Fraser, maybe just the suggestion of a stoop in his broad-shouldered gait.