Returning to Down Town: Was Henry Selick’s Bizarre Dark Comedy ‘Monkeybone’ Really That Bad?

The mainstream film industry seems like it’s finally ready to accept that animation can also be used to tell adult-oriented stories, but there are still very few animators that specialize in creating hand-crafted frights. In fact, most of the popular spooky animated films out there were actually directed by the same legendary filmmaker – the insanely talented Henry Selick.

However, after making it big in the ’90s with The Nightmare Before Christmas (as well as the less successful but still entertaining James and the Giant Peach), Selick decided that it was time to try his luck with live-action storytelling, a decision that led to the infamous 2001 flop Monkeybone. However, despite the film’s reputation as a nearly incomprehensible mess, today I’d like to discuss how this oddball production might still appeal to modern-day horror fans.

Before Monkeybone there was Kaja Blackley’s Dark Town. An indie comic-book about a man who gets into a car accident and wakes up in a nightmarish land ruled by puppets, this critical darling miraculously reached Hollywood through a dedicated fan despite Kaja only ever releasing a single issue that ended on a cliffhanger. Once Selick received a copy of the comic through one of his producers, the director began securing funding for what he thought was going to be one of his most personal projects yet.

Unfortunately, the higher-ups were unsure if Selick’s talents would translate well to a live-action environment and began meddling in the production. That’s how a film that was originally meant to be an exceedingly dark and faithful recreation of the source material was slowly transformed into a crowd-pleasing blockbuster more akin to a poor man’s The Mask. The studio even wrenched control away from Selick during the editing phase, removing crucial pieces of worldbuilding and character development in order to streamline the experience.

In the “finished” film, which was released with little marketing buzz in February of 2001, Brendan Fraser stars as Stu, a weary cartoonist who finally achieved success by producing an animated series about his most personal creation, the mischievous Monkeybone (voiced by John Turturro). After getting into a car accident, Stu enters a coma and awakens in Down Town – a carnivalesque afterlife populated by nightmares, gods and figments of the waking world’s imagination. Once there, our hero reluctantly partners with Monkeybone himself and embarks on a twisted quest to return to his body before his estranged sister literally “pulls the plug.”