THE ADDAMS FAMILY
Altogether ooky
RELEASED 2 MARCH (download out now)
2019 | PG | Blu-ray/DVD/download
Directors Conrad Vernon,
Greg Tiernan
Cast Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron, Chloe Grace Moretz, Finn Wolfhard
Live action took them to the big time – a TV show in the ’60s, two mainstream movies in the ’90s – but the ghoulish clan created by Charles Addams are a natural fit for animation, having originated as morbidly witty cartoons in the pages of The New Yorker.
This new take is brought to the screen in high-end digital style, but it retains the essence of Addams’s universe. The visuals are faithful, for all that there are modish gags about Instagram: Gomez is a pin-striped Peter Lorre, Morticia a cadaverous Gloria Swanson, Lurch a hulking, melancholy Karloff. Preserved, too, is the perverse Addams logic, where vacuum cleaners billow dust into a room and nothing’s so romantic as picking out cemetery plots together.
There’s some fairly trite satire as the mansion-dwelling brood encounter their homogenised neighbours – who live in a pastel-hued town named Assimilation, no less. But it’s playfully done and never less than impressively rendered, full of texture, sight gags and just a hint of disease in the grimier corners of chez Addams.
A big-hitter voice cast includes the likes of Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron and Chloe Grace Moretz as psycho-goth Wednesday. Given to quoting Watchmen’s Rorschach, she’s not so much mysterious, spooky and altogether ooky as legitimately terrifying.
Extras Deleted and extended scenes, some only roughly animated (six minutes); a behind-the-scenes featurette (six minutes); a kid-friendly, step-bystep guide to how the animation was created (three minutes); an interactive charades game with Thing; and a shamefully brief featurette on the original Charles Addams cartoons (one lousy minute). Plus: lyric videos for the numbers “Haunted Heart” and “My Family”. Nick Setchfield