I saw the movie back then, but somehow I missed it: Kathleen Turner played in Monster House and not just any part, she plays the coolest part: the house.
According to Hollywood lore, Zemecki’s convinced her to take the part arguing that she had played the sexiest animated character ever …

… now it would be time to play the ugliest. Good call!

Monster House itself is a bit of a strange mixture. The acting is all mo-cap and has its Polar Express zombie moments but this one is a lot better than the other Zemecki’s adventures in this area (Beowulf? Christmas Carol?) and it is mainly because of the house. The “real” actors are much more cartoonish in Monster House but they can still be strangely off. However, the “fake” house is spot on. A real showcase of animation in full action. In the making of special features of the DVD you can see a glimpse of Kathleen Turner all wired up for the performance capture as she leaps forward … literally playing the house.
There is also another making of that talks about the special controls they used to control the camera – and I wished we had seen that before we worked on comparable problems. It is not so easy to really see the actual set ups used in real life and we could have used it as a much better starting point than the Wii controller we used originally.
Finally, I had to wonder what happens to the data set of these kind of movies. As full-blown performance capture pieces they could be re-used in all kinds of ways. Yes, Monster House was also released as 3D – one more reason to see how those camera swoops were made. But I am thinking about other options, too. This could be the perfect data set for a Machinima were a new director could get down and dirty. Gil Kenan, director on Monster House, was pretty fresh from film school himself and went straight to an Oscar nomination with that one.