Call it the Alien/Aliens effect. One alien on a single spaceship is a horror story, but a thousand aliens in a colony is almost necessarily an action pic. So while any single monster from R. L. Stine's series of young adult horror novels may have been enough to make kids …
Machine-made cartoon from DreamWorks, credited to co-directors Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon. It posits a secret government quarantine of benign monsters modelled on such Fifties archetypes as the Blob, the four-fifths-human Fly (except now a Cockroach), Mothra, the 50-Foot Woman (a girl-power placebo), and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. …
Subaqueous computer animation; or, Finding Nemo's Sunken Treasure. Not only is the plasticky animation done by computer, but also the plotting, scripting, casting, everything. We have here, plugged in as variables in the formula, hip-hop fish (voice, and lips, of Will Smith), Mafia sharks (voice and facial mole of Robert …