An Imaginative Accident

If you put a chimpanzee in a room with a camera and an editing suite for a hundred years, would he come up with Monkeybone? Maybe not, although it sometimes seems this scattered movie was put together in just such a fashion. Based on a graphic novel and directed by the talented Henry Selick (of Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach), Monkeybone skitters off in a dozen directions at once.

On the plot level, it's about a cartoonist, Stu Miley (Brendan Fraser), whose comic character Monkeybone is about to make him a rich man. But Stu is a depressive art type; his black-and-white sketches look like storyboards for a Kafka biography. On the night he plans to propose marriage to girlfriend Julie (Bridget Fonda), a car accident puts him in a coma. Naturally, we journey with him to the strange half-world of his mind: Downtown, a loading zone between heaven and hell, where (oddly enough, for the purposes of the film's entertainment value) not a great deal happens.

Monkeybone, Stu's creation, is alive and well in Downtown, thanks to computer animation and the voice of John Turturro. While Stu goes through his surprisingly pedestrian adventures Downtown, things are not looking good in the waking world. His sister (Megan Mullally, doing a variation on her "Will and Grace" termagant) wants to pull the plug in his hospital room, but Julie remains steadfast. Eventually, after dickering with Death (Whoopi Goldberg) in Downtown, Monkeybone gets flipped back into the body of Stu, transforming Stu into pure swinging id.

This movie has a lot of gratifyingly wacky touches, in line with Selick's identity as a junior version of Tim Burton. The creatures of Downtown are lovingly weird, and the god of sleep (Giancarlo Esposito), half man and half goat -- I guess -- is just the right blend of funny and creepy. Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe are hanging around. Brendan Fraser, a very game fellow, sings "Brick House" to a room of swells. Whoopi Goldberg's head comes off.

But by the time Stu's spirit is zapped into the body of a floppy corpse with a broken neck -- played with all the rubbery agility Chris Kattan can muster -- it's overkill already. There are laughs here, but Selick doesn't corral them, and the movie has no shape. You could argue that Tim Burton has made a career out of similar things, but at least there's a mad engine driving Burton's messes. Monkeybone looks like a very cheerful and imaginative accident.