Debut director Gil Kenan opted for animation when he was given the chance to turn the script of a house with an appetite for touble into a movie. Steve Pratt reports.

IF you're going to make your feature film debut with an ambitious animated movie then it's no handicap to have the likes of Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis as executive producers. Gil Kenan went from making a $400 student film, The Lark, to directing one of the summer blockbusters Monster House, that's been called "the best kids' movie of the year".

The movie was made using motion-capture animation in which the actors were filmed and then turned into animated characters with, in the case of Monster House, a CGI-created living, breathing house.

"The Lark cost $400 so obviously the difference in scale and scope in vast,' says Kenan. "But in some ways I felt that this was my first shot, I was given the enormous opportunity so I approached it as if it was a personal student film in a way. I threw myself into it, and so I feel like partially it gave me that sense of delirium you have when you're making a film, where you put blinkers on to the harsh realities and just focus on what it takes to tell the story. I'm starting to wake now from that delirium but that's what carried me through it."

Monster House finds a group of young friends, caught somewhere between childhood and puberty, investigating weird old man Nebbercracker's home, a building that seems to have a life of its own, swallowing up objects and people that stray too close. The Lark used live action actors in an animated environment so had something in common with Monster House. "Something I've been exploring in my student films was the relationship between humans and their environment, treating environments as characters rather than just sets," says Kenan.

"The Lark is really a small domestic story about a couple, and the wife's emotional state is echoed in the physical superstructure of the house. It's much less expressive than the monster house, it doesn't have any real presence, it's just there as a character in the story.

"And so when the script for Monster House came to me, I hit my head against the wall. I couldn't believe my luck. It was the most perfect way to continue the theme that I was trying to explore at school."

Monster House has a PG rating, an indication that Kenan has managed to make the film scary, but not frightening enough to send young audiences screaming from the cinema "You have to trust your instincts as to what kids can handle and what kids want to experience but aren't allowed to because we've coddled them with very benign family films over the last 20 years.

Working with Spielberg and Zemekis was a great deal for him. The story was initially pitched to Zemeckis ten years ago and he took it to Spielberg with whom he had a deal. Together they developed the project.

"I was raised on their films, that was my cinematic universe growing up, so obviously ther spirit floats around in my bones. Aside from that, they were truly champions of the story."

For Kenan, Monster House had to be an animated movie because of the intersection between the fantasy of the living, expressive house and humans existing in the world. "I fervently feel if this was a live action film, the child actors in front of a blue screen and a CG house chasing them through the streets, you'd lose a great deal of the fantasy that I was trying to create. There's a lot of magic in animation which allows us to go that extra step in puting ourselves into a fantastical story. To me that's the true justfication of it."

* Monster House is showing across the region from tomorrow.