After “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Corpse Bride,” “Monsters, Inc.” and “Coraline,” “Vampirina” and “Super Monsters,” and too many “Addams Family” and “Hotel Transylvania” movies to count, the gothic ghoulie kiddie comedy is now as mainstream as any Disney princess fantasy, and in many cases as wholesome.
Timed for Halloween, “Stitch Head” is an animated bauble, financed independently in Europe, so you’d think it would have a bit of an edge to it. The title character is a lost-boy version of Frankenstein’s monster, with a bald, patched-together noggin that looks like a skin-sewn baseball. He’s got a swatch of brown around his left eye, for that cobbled-together-out-of-spare-parts effect, and once he becomes a carnival sideshow attraction he starts wearing Freddy Krueger’s sweater. Beneath the monster-movie trappings, though, he’s just a winsome British urchin looking for a home.
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Based on the graphic novel by Guy Bass and Pete Williamson, “Stitch Head” has an elegantly debauched visual flair to it — a look of puckish spookiness. I was encouraged by the opening minutes, which feature images of a medieval stone village that are painterly in a skewed way, like “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” revamped by Pixar. One by one, the voice-cast names appear under the following designations: The Freakish (Asa Butterfield), The Gruesome (Joel Fry), The Demented (Rob Brydon), The Hideous (Tia Bannon), The Repulsive (Jamali Maddix), and The Repugnant (Ryan Sampson). I thought: sounds like my cup of nightmare kiddie camp.
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But “Stitch Head,” while it remains visually clever, has a bare-bones script that makes it feel like a Pixar movie the writers forgot to add enough jokes to. It seems to be going for the punk spirit that defined the delinquent-kid-next-door sections of “Toy Story,” but those toys were damaged. These monsters are just fuzzy-creepy-cute. And while it’s fine that the movie is knocking off “Frankenstein” (though Tim Burton did that 20 years ago), it’s also knocking off other things left and right — starting with Burton’s whole walking-dead-on-happy-pills sensibility, which is does a very toned-down version of.
Stitch Head, voiced with forlorn innocence by Asa Butterfield, was the first monster hatched in the laboratory of the Professor (Brydon), an absent-minded mad scientist who is less Frankenstein than Doc from “Back to the Future.” He presides over Castle Grotteskew, high on a twisted cliff above the town of Grubbers Nubbin, where he’s created a whole menagerie of monsters (frog on a coiled spring, baby-voiced shark, two-headed caterpillar, scarlet puffball), who are knockoffs of the ones in “Monsters, Inc.” The main creature, who is named (wait for it) Creature, is a furry, floppy-eared cyclops who sports a slender human third arm but basically looks like a cross between that film’s two main characters.
The central joke is a familiar and benign one: People are supposed to be afraid of monsters, but up in Castle Grotteskew it’s the monsters who are scared — of an “angry mob,” like the one that shows up at the end of “Frankenstein.” We know they’re scared of it because the film alludes to their ironic terror about 100 times.
With the Professor as self-involved absentee daddy, Stitch Head doesn’t feel like he’s getting much love at home. So he runs away to join the geek circus led by Fulbert Freakfinder (Seth Usdenov), a greedy ringmaster who leers and proclaims like an exploitation-film version of Jim Broadbent’s Harold Zidler in “Moulin Rouge!” He utters the word “moan-stuh!” a lot and says things like, “Would you not care to blight your lovely eyes forever with one brief glimpse of a thing most horrid and foul?!” He puts Stitch Head on display, which initially inspires each patron to scream in panic after getting a glimpse of him. But it’s not long before Stitch Head has become a rock star of fear, bolstered by merch like commemorative plates and bottle openers.
There are a handful of jaunty musical numbers, like Fulbert singing “Make ’em Scream” (“There’s nothing quite as gorgeous as an audience that’s nauseous!”), but the movie, despite its storybook images, is rather toothless, with a plot that runs out of gas. In the end, of course, an angry mob does chase the monsters around the castle, only to be chased by them in return (the monsters having rediscovered their reason for being), which results in some serviceable monster slapstick. Stitch Head, still looking for a family, will bond with Arabella (Tia Bannon), the town moppet in giant spectacles and pigtails, and he’ll be rescued by Creature, a one-note character who is, in a word, dim, though that makes him perfect to blink his big green eye and say, “You’re my bestest best friend, remember?” “Stitch Head” is a mild black comedy for 7-year-olds that never hesitates to put the horror on hold for a hug.