rated PG

The animated “Monster House” takes place in typical Spielbergian suburbia (Sir Steven was one of the executive producers, along with director Bob Zemeckis), in which everything looks fairly typical and calm until something magical or otherworldly happens (think “E.T.”, think “Poltergeist.”). It’s a place where children are given all the “normal” attributes of young people, yet spring to superhero status when the time is right (think “The Goonies” or “Young Sherlock Holmes” or a thousand variations thereof). It’s a place where the mundane is suppose to hide a lurking menace or astonishing secret, and the revealing of the secret is supposed to generate a sense of awe and wonder in the audience (“Back to the Future,” and etc., so forth and so on). It’s a place where adults are curiously absent, and if they do present themselves they’re too distracted or self-involved to be much help (see any of the above).

It’s also a place of stereotypes—the smart girl is a nerd, the chubby guy is awkward and goofy, and the better looking kid gets the girl and the villain is a rotting structure that is inhabited by the soul of  (spoiler alert!) a fat lady from a traveling carnival. (I wonder if the greatest sin in Hollywood is to be fat.) The character is a grotesque—she’s not just obese but a violent harpy to boot. Her few lines are spoken by Kathleen Turner, in what must have taken all of 15 minutes to do.

“Monster House” tells a simple story simply: the old house in the neighborhood is avoided by all the kids because the crabby man living inside hates children. Mr. Nebbercracker (voiced by the great Steve Buscemi) steals all the toys when they end up on his lawn. It’s a benign kind of horror, and a fairly realistic experience for many suburban children. But even in the smallest details the storytellers fall short: Nebbercracker is one of those Hollywood character names concocted to be whimsical and memorable but in this case is really neither

On one Halloween Eve, though, two young friends, DJ (Mitchel Musso) and Chowder (he’s the chubby one, voiced beautifully by an actor named Sam Lerner) are playing basketball. The basketball gets loose and ends up on old Nebbercracker’s lawn. Risking getting yelled at, they go after it (well, Chowder doesn’t because he’s chubby, and therefore a coward). Only this time the house, seemingly dormant for many years, comes frighteningly to life.

Well, not quite.

The concept of a house as a living thing—embodied by a soul, its façade retaining the features of a human face—is not exactly new, and “Monster House” manages to add almost nothing fresh to the mix. Yes, its front door becomes a gaping maw. The windows turn into eyes and the old wooden slats become teeth. As our intrepid teenaged heroes descend into the house to kill the “heart” of the rampaging domicile, it of course turns into a hulking, heaving, glowing, angry thing.

But the pacing in “Monster House” feels slack, and none of the adventures have any tension or sense of excitement to them. To maybe give you an idea as to how forced things feel in “Monster House,” the uvula —yes, the uvula—plays an important role.

It could be that the idea of putting animated characters into dangerous or life-threatening situations has become self-defeating. We know the actor hanging by his fingernails to stop himself from falling into the pit of hell isn’t even really there, so why get worked up about it?

I continue to marvel at how much detail can be created by animation, and in fact some shots in “Monster House” look so real you almost think they were shot on film. The attention to background imaging has become spectacular—it’s a paradise of detail, where everything from the veins on a falling leaf to a brief reflection in a pane of glass is rendered with beauty and care.

And yet, curiously, the human form still seems be elusive (the last Zemeckis CGI project was the downright creepy “The Polar Express”). Here the animators make people deliberately doll-like in their features: their heads are outsized, their bodies too skinny, the eyes freakishly lifeless, the skin looks like veneer and the hair like a plastic wig. CGI can also make dinosaurs run like gazelles and green ogres move with comic grace, and yet the movements of human beings seem stylized and maddeningly unbelievable. Very odd.

As is the whole of “Monster House.” I was looking forward to it, but almost nothing worked for me. If you want to visit a house that will really get under your skin, I suggest “The Haunting,” made in 1963. It’s in black and white and has real actors in it, but when someone in that movie goes to open a door, you may just find yourself shouting “Don’t!”, but for all the right reasons.