Monsters University

Monsters Inc is not the best Pixar movie out there. It is, however, the most underrated Pixar movie. It is a personal favorite of mine and when I heard I would get to revisit two of my favorite Pixar characters, I was stoked. I loved the teaser trailers and how they were playing up the college experience. I did not have super high expectations because I never do with sequels/prequels, but they did a very nice job of marketing and selling the movie. There is an issue with Pixar though, and that is that I have come to expect greatness every time out. After the trifecta of Wall-E, UP, and Toy Story 3, I have begun to fear that they will never reach that again. Therefore, I tried to really stick to my lowered expectations this time out.

Mike Wizowski (Billy Crystal) has had one dream his whole life: to be a scarer. As a kid he visited Monsters Incorporated and met the best scarer ever and that scarer gave him a baseball cap of his college, Monsters University. Mike has a problem though, he is little and not scary and everyone underestimates him. He gets into Monsters University and is a scaring major. He rooms with Randy and they are good friends, but Randy wants to be cool and Mike just wants to get straight As. Mike knows everything. He can ace every test, but is he scary? No, not really. On the flip side is Sully. Sully is a giant behemoth of a monster whose natural scaring ability makes him super lazy. He and Mike become rivals and after an accident gets them both kicked out of the scare program, they have to team up to win the annual Scare Games. Their team consists of the outcasts, the non scary monsters, but they have to find a way to band together and win the games.

Monsters University is a cute, fluffy movie without much else going on. So much of the comedy comes from the first 35 minutes when college is still the main part. I loved all of the little collegiate details they get right, especially when they come back in January and it is all cold and rainy and everyone is miserable. I got a kick out of watching an octopus style monster downing a bunch of coffee right before finals. I also loved the opening stuff in the quad where everyone was trying to get monsters to join their clubs. I feel like animated fluffy monster movies are aimed at kids, so it is nice to see that they still throw the adults something. However, I did feel like a majority of this movie is aimed squarely at kids. There is nothing wrong with that at all, but at a scant 100 minutes, I still felt like the movie ran a little long. It did not have enough legs for me. The biggest reason I love Monsters Inc is the chemistry between Mike and Sully. This is problematic in this film because they spend most of the movie not liking each other very much. They robbed me of this great duo through the whole movie and it just did not work for me as much as I would have liked it to.

Yet there is some great creativity at work here. The Scare Games are tons of fun to watch. Most of it is taken from other stories and tweaked to fit the genre, but I got a kick out of the competition where panels would turn and they had to ignore the teens, but scare the kids. The panels had clever audio to them for the teenagers. And I absolutely love the idea of the simulated scarer. The little details are very neat. I love the idea that there are a bunch of different kind of scares and you have to know which kind to use on which kid and, in all honesty, I would have been much more fascinated by a film that discusses those, but that would not make a very entertaining kids film. I think the problem boils down to the teaser traler. The teaser trailer made the film look like it was a big college movie with Monster style parties and with Mike used as a disco ball. There were all these funny pranks in the teaser and none of that is in the movie. It moves through your basic college stuff quickly to get to the real story, but I guess I wish the story had been more about the college experience and more of a coming of age tale and less of the contest film.

I hope that this is the end for these characters, except maybe in Pixar shorts. I am not sure I need to know what happens after the scaring gives way to the laughing. I am a bit bummed I know what happened before they became the best scaring team in history. Sometimes it is okay to just tell one story about characters and just let the rest be a mystery. Pixar has created some of the most memorable movies for young people that are beloved by people of all ages. Maybe they should just focus on creating new characters not new adventures for the characters we already love.