House, Netflix, Review: Roald Dahl Meets Stephen King in Horror Animated Adventures

Wes Anderson’s 2009 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox has invented a new genre of stop-motion animation, in which cute animals play burdened with existential anxiety (obviously a melancholic example can be made Bagpuss there first). Fantastic Mr Fox also featured a Jarvis Cocker cameo in which frontman Pulp parodied his public figure as the coldest man in pop.

Anderson was not involved The house, Netflix ‘s new three – part series of animated short films. The screenplay was written by playwright Enda Walsh Cillian Murphy on his way to fame with Disco Pigs and collaborated with David Bowie to his stunning musical Lazarus. Nevertheless, the spirit of the animated Fantastic Mr. Fox introduces this strange, sometimes unaltered anthology, which arrives in the same splendor of the store that is Anderson’s character.

It also features Cocker, who appears in the second of three short stories (directed by Swedish director Niki Lindroth von Bahr). The singer tackles his gothic murmur and expresses a depressed mouse / real estate developer trying to sell a mysterious apartment infested with dancing cockroaches. Insects are disgusting. And yet everything else in The House is as weird and affected as craft beer served by men with tattoos on their sleeves and spring mustaches.

Thank goodness for the other two stories, which are significantly less repulsive and can be enjoyed without a pillow strategically placed in front of a sensitive viewer’s face. It all revolves around the recurring “sign” of a strange house in the fog. In the first, directed by Belgian animators Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels, the unlucky father (Matthew Goode) relocates his family to a new estate built by the mysterious patron.

The benefactor obviously has no intention of doing anything good. And poor Raymond and his wife Penelope (Claudie Blakley) soon literally transform because of their respectable hunger for middle class and leave their daughter Mabel (Mia Goth) to save her sister. The predictable complication is partly solved by an exciting animation in which the characters are depicted from a kind of soft foam. They are reminiscent of half-finished rag dolls – an effect far more frightening than a linear scenario played out as Stephen King routing Location, Location, Location.