Try as other nations might, the animated movie is pretty squarely an American thing. I mean, obviously animated films come from all over, but a certain kind of animated film, the big smash kind that wins all the awards and gets all the money and that gets released timed perfectly for school holidays or half terms or whatever, that’s the kind that I mean is ‘pretty squarely’ American. Despite the apparent pseudo breaking down of international borders in the modern age thanks to the magic of technology, this same magic has pretty much locked in the animated spectacular to something really only the big American studios can afford to do now. In particular Disney obviously, given their bid to consume as many media companies as possible. Of course, Disney’s output was typically the gold standard that most people who threw their hat into the ring wanted to meet, but with the death of traditional cel animated film as big business, you have to compete in the wacky world of CGI.

In darkest Transylvania, Count Dracula (voice of Jason Isaacs) lives alone (assuming you don’t count the help; bah, the aristocracy) in a great big castle with nothing to do other than perform elaborate cabaret numbers. UNTIL! One day, he gets a phone call from one Emma Wishbone (v/o Emily Watson), a wife and mother of two from Generic American City where everyone has English accents for no real reason; she’s done misdialled a number, including the country code somehow, while looking for Hallowe’en costume supplies, in a desperate bid to bond with her shitty family that’s on the brink of disintegrating as a unit. Being the first non-servant that he’s spoken to in eons or whatever, he’s instantly smitten. Fortunately for him, he’s got the Baba Yaga (v/o Catherine Tate) locked up in the basement and so sends her off to convert Mrs Wishbone to the joys of Vampirism; he can’t do it himself the traditional way, because something about how that would corrupt her soul thereby changing her as a person. Anyway, Emma’s quest for Hallowe’en costumes pays off; her miserable family, who naturally fit some standard cliches (swotty child, insecure teen, overworked and ineffectual husband), rather begrudgingly set out. Being unhappy with their present situation, they’re putty in the hands of the Baba Yaga’s magic, and so Emma is changed into a vampire. However due to proximity, her family are also changed into their respective costumes. Wouldn’t you believe it, but they have to work together to catch the Baba Yaga and get changed back into humans? Assuming that’s really the best idea.

Monster Family comes to us from Germany where it has the slightly less blunt title 'Happy Family' (in English, even)… well, from there amongst other places. A project like this pretty much begs for multinational investment; for instance, it has the dubious honour of being the first film to come out of Sky’s recently revived original film arm, as they seemed to take great pains to point out in the marketing (except for the ‘revived’ bit, but apparently we don’t talk about the stuff they had going on back in the late ‘90s, early ‘00s). It’s mostly German in origin however.

Its budget was apparently some $30m. For comparison, the most recent ‘big’ animated films at the time, knocked out by Pixar (Coco (2017)) and the now defunct Blue Sky Studios (Ferdinand (2017)), were both budgeted at over $100m each; the former probably more in the region of $200m. With that in mind, what they’ve accomplished here (visually) is somewhat impressive. Of course, it’s also a grossly unfair comparison, as they, along with Disney proper and Dreamworks, tend(ed) to have the biggest budgets in general, but Monster Family’s $30m is still less than half of the typical budget afforded by Warner or Sony or (non-Dreamworks) Universal to animated projects. Frankly it’s difficult to think of a particularly fair point of comparison; there aren’t that many animated films without American investment that get this far. From Wikipedia’s big list of computer animated films, there were all of five (including this one) that weren’t American productions or co-productions which I have any recollection of receiving any sort of heavy mainstream marketing push.† While Wikipedia’s list almost certainly isn’t exhaustive, but it still seems indicative as a whole. Funnily enough, this is the only one that isn’t French. Anyway, I’ve only seen like two of those, not including this one. And so in short I guess I’m stuck comparing it to, like, A Monster in Paris (2011) which still feels a bit off given the age difference.

While the older film perhaps inevitably comes out the worse in a visual comparison given how quickly technology can march on and affordability of resources and all that, it does at least have a level of confidence and competence in its storytelling as well as a certain appealing level of imaginative abstraction to its visuals which help mask (to a point) that they seemingly only had the budget to render like twelve people (including the main cast) to populate the oddly desolate French capital. Monster Family does manage to have people exist beyond the core cast, as well as the odd bit of nice visual design, such as the German Expressionist thing that Dracula’s castle has going sometime (only sometimes, mind you, ‘cause who needs consistency), even if it’s mostly just blandly by the numbers. What it can’t seem to come up with is things like a plot that extends far beyond cliches and the odd fart joke, much less the idea of structuring these cliches and fart jokes into a satisfying narrative; it doesn’t even really tie the monsterified forms of family into their personal malfunction the way The Incredibles (2004) did with superpowers, or if you want to stick with the family of monsters thing, the way I’m Gonna Be an Angel (1999) does.‡ For one, I mean, yeah, let’s not pretend that farts aren’t funny, but there’s like fart jokes and fart jokes, y’know. I don’t know why I’m going on about the farts, as they’re something the film sets up and just drops as a character trait (the father gets gassy when stressed, complete with visible stench cloud; this is established various times in the first act and then they confirm that the Frankenstein’s monster type is him when he farts, after which there’s nary squeak from his bowels for the remainder of the film… I suppose I should be glad that they didn’t have his wonder flatus play a major part in climax, but it’s such a laborious set up for such a weak payoff, I kind of wish they did have farting be crucial to saving the day somehow), but it feels somewhat emblematic of the problems at the film’s core.

Here's the thing… despite the film’s dire critical and commercial reception (despite the marketing push, supposedly its takings at the UK box office were <£500k… having been released in time for the school holidays… admittedly part of the deal was that it was released on Sky Cinema at the same time, so maybe it served its purpose on that front), it isn’t as bad as its reputation. Do not read this as meaning that it’s good actually. It isn’t. The plot drifts along from beat to beat with little sense of connective tissue, it’s constantly setting up ideas that have no pay off, and there’s very little interesting about the characters or the dialogue. Its little game of ‘let’s introduce a theme’ is rather galling; inevitably it’s doubtful that it could possibly keep all these balls in the air, but it doesn’t even bloody try a lot of the time. As such, there’s a lot of potentially interesting stuff that goes unrealised, and really makes me feel like there is actually something half-decent buried in here somewhere. It occasionally hits on some vaguely interesting stuff regarding loneliness and isolation that feels like a more adventurous film might have taken to more interesting heights. Seriously, I thought while watching it, there could be a fairly wholesome film about the dissolution of a family; FrankenDad and DracuMum part amicably because they’re not working as a couple anymore, no one’s really at fault, everyone’s a lot happier, and kids in the audience learn that sometimes marriages don’t work out and it’s better for everyone involved to know that trying to force it into working won’t help and will probably just lead to more misery for them and for everyone in their orbit. Obviously, it doesn’t do that. You know while watching that it won’t do that. Instead, it goes for the pat lessons about the importance of family via contorting through some plot and character development hoops that end up feeling highly unearned. It can’t even manage the Princess Arete / Kirikou and the Sorceress ending that it feels like it’s spending a lot of time building up to for ol’ Dracula. Certainly it half arses his villain credentials to the point where the film essentially says ‘oh, shit, he hasn’t actually done anything bad beyond put the moves on the mother… er, fuck it, he wants to destroy the world now, I guess’ in the second half. Don’t worry, like any ongoing plot threads in this film, it gets introduced, then dropped, reintroduced and dropped again, several times over its 90-ish minutes, so you won’t be hearing that much about it. Certainly, less of it than you will the stuff about him being isolated and alone and also not very vampiric. The lesson is that some people just don’t deserve love, I guess.

I think enough people think that about themselves that they don’t really want to hear it from a kid’s film.

† In case you were wondering, they were, as far as I recall, The Magic Roundabout (France/UK, 2005), A Monster in Paris (France/Belgium, 2011), The House of Magic (Belgium/France, 2013) and Ballerina (France/Canada, 2016). Also, in case you were wondering about that as well, the two of those that I’ve seen are the first two. These aren’t the only non-American CGI animated films, but they are the only ones that I recall receiving a push comparable to major American efforts. There were some that I thought would count, such as Valiant (2005), Postman Pat (2014) and Playmobil: The Movie (2019), but on digging they apparently all had notable US involvement, so they’re rather borderline despite their seeming Eurocentricity. Anyway, yeah, real motley selection there, no?

‡ You thought I was gonna say The Munsters, didn’t you? Pshaw, the central conceit there is that their monstrousness is explicitly not reflective of who they are. It’s like a metaphor about bigotry or something.