With Halloween having just gone by, monster movies were all
the rage. From blockbuster horror movies to small screen fun flicks, monsters
are always in when October comes around. Along with the bigger names though,
there are also some lesser known projects that work their way in. One of those
lower-profile projects I happened across was a 3D animated film called Monster
Island. It looked interesting when I happened across it, but will others find
it so?
Let’s look at Monster Island.
STORY
The movie focuses on a boy named Lucas and his father
Nicolas (no last name given). They live a normal life in a regular city (also
no name given), until a Halloween party where Lucas turns into a monster in
front of everybody. Nicolas then reveals that he is secretly a monster too and
they both come from an island of monsters called Caldera. Angry at having been kept in the dark for so long, Lucas runs away
from home to find Caldera and discover his true heritage, with Nicolas
following soon after to make sure his son is safe.
That’s about as much as I can explain before diving into
spoilers.
The story raises a lot of questions. Why did they leave the
island in the first place? What happened to Lucas’s mother? While some of the
questions raised get answered, others, particularly minor ones, don’t, but
they’re mostly just side details that don’t have a direct impact on the main
plot. Speaking of the main plot though, once the setting shifts
from the human city to Caldera, the plot takes a few different twists and
turns, especially as certain characters get introduced, and this creepy comedy
gets a few more action sequences thrown in.
Looking at this story, it draws a
few comparisons to some other movies, particularly Firebreather, a story about
a half-human/half-kaiju (don’t think too hard on that) who has a mostly normal
life as a high schooler until stuff happens and he is forced to embrace his
monster side. While comparisons to other movies do show up, Monster Island
isn’t as blatant or egregious about it as other movies and while a movie like
Firebreather establishes quickly that it wants to be more action-focused,
Monster Island gets to it later in the story, but hints at it earlier on. It
wants to try more to build up the events to the main climax at the end.
CHARACTERS
At the beginning of the movie, when Lucas is still going to
high school, before the ill-fated Halloween party, you see a lot of typical
high school archetypes. There’s the jerk jock, the bullied nerd, the stuck-up
hot girl, and Lucas is basically the everyman. As the plot continues, we see
more of Lucas’s personality as he is an adventurous person who’s not afraid to
take risks and doesn’t want to wait to do what he thinks he needs to do. His
father Nicolas is the same way. While a lot of his motivation may have to with
keeping his son safe, he also shows a bit of his own adventurous side as well
over the course of the story. The other important characters in this movie, who
I won’t elaborate on for spoiler reasons, fit their roles relatively well, but
apart from two, none of them stand out from the roles they play.
VISUALS & AUDIO
The visuals in this movie are a bit odd. Comparing the city
at the start of the movie with the island of Caldera, there are a lot of clear
differences and I’m not sure if all of them are intentional. In the city, some
of the buildings stand at weird angles and have weird colorations. Granted,
these are buildings in the background, but it stands out when compared to a
town in Caldera, where all the buildings are standing up straight. In fact, in one
shot at the start of the movie, there are several buildings that seem to lean
in strange angles and only two small buildings don’t, one of them being the one
Lucas and Nicolas live in. I’m not sure if this was just rushed animation or a
design choice to subtly show how Lucas really belongs in Caldera and not in the
human city.
Speaking of Caldera, this is clearly a monster island. All the
monsters on the island have a variety of different looks and attributes, with
some looking like classic mythology creatures and some looking like they were
inspired by movies like Monsters Inc. or The Nightmare Before Christmas. Even
some of the plant life looks monstrous with some of the tropical plants looking
like they have eyes, or tentacles, or mouths full of fangs. Compare this to the
regular looking human characters and the city they live in at the start of the
movie and you can clearly see what part of this movie the animators were really
looking forward to.
As far as the audio goes, it does its job, but doesn’t really
stand out. For the most part, the music isn’t that memorable, but it doesn’t
pull you out of the film either. The exceptions here are when the film decides
to insert a couple of pop songs into a couple of different scenes. They’re okay
songs on their own, but here, they feel out of place. For the voice work,
again, it does its job, but they aren’t standout performances.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Monster Island is an okay film to watch, especially around
Halloween if you have young kids and you’re looking for something both
monstrous and obscure. The story could definitely use some work in a few
places, it could stand to fill a few plot holes, and this kind of story was done better in other movies, but the visuals and the
designs on the monsters and the titular monster island are trick-or-treat eye-candy, especially if you like different kinds of creatures.
It’s not the best thing out there, but it’s not the worst either.
