Directed by: Dan Scanlon
Starring: Billy Crystal, John Goodman, Helen Mirren
Rated G, 110 minutes
The release of a Pixar movie is always a big event, whether because of the animation company’s technical perfection or because the stories they come up with are, time and time again, more clever and sophisticated than those of other cartoons. After a couple of recent stumbles, I for one was starting to worry that the Pixar dynasty was going to give way to, you know, fair competition. But a frenetic and goofy return to the world of monsters is a strong reminder that the dynasty is here to stay.
In “Monsters University,” the prequel to 2001’s “Monsters, Inc.,” we see monster buddies Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal, “When Harry Met Sally…”) and James “Sulley” Sullivan (John Goodman, “Argo”) at an earlier time in their lives—namely, when they weren’t friends yet but merely fellow students at the prestigious Monsters University. The two are polar opposites, really—Mike is a bookworm who’s been studying everything there is to know about scaring since he was little (even though he isn’t very scary looking), while Sulley is a natural scarer (albeit a lousy student) from a long line of Sullivans who went into the noble profession of scaring children. The only thing they have in common is that they’re both in the university’s scaring program, but a petty rivalry of theirs gets them both kicked out, crushing both their dreams.
That is, until they discover the Scare Games, a huge competition among the fraternities and sororities on campus. Mike makes a deal with the strict Dean Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren, “The Queen”) that if they can win the Scare Games, she’ll let them back into the scaring program. She agrees, but Mike and Sulley’s team for the Games is pretty pathetic, consisting of the unpopular, uncool Oozma Kappa fraternity. And Mike and Sulley aren’t exactly the best of friends, blaming each other for getting kicked out of the scaring program in the first place. But they’re going to have to work together if they want to see their dreams of scaring children realized.
Much like “Monsters, Inc.,” this chapter of Mike and Sulley’s lives is successful in large part because it’s a showcase of the wild imaginations of its animators. The sheer diversity of the monsters themselves allows for a wide variety of styles, and Scanlon’s team of animators perfectly pairs the monsters in this wonderful spectrum with all sorts of character types, from frat brothers to hippies to nerds to everything in between.
Lively vocal performances by Billy Crystal, John Goodman, and a large supporting cast including Steve Buscemi, Charlie Day, Nathan Fillion, Aubrey Plaza, and others lends extra energy to the already colorful panorama. And Mirren proves an ominous villain—although it’s too trivial to say Hardscrabble is a villain; Scanlon and the other writers have created a nemesis that’s more of a threat than an enemy, an instigator rather than a saboteur. It’s nice to see movies, even deceptively “simple” cartoons, with characters that aren’t mere caricatures.
And yet, there is something trivial about “Monsters University.” Where “Monsters, Inc.” followed Mike and Sulley as they tried to avoid a major panic in the world of monsters, the prequel centers around a frat competition, which is awfully tame by comparison. Despite efforts to raise the stakes (or at least convince us that they’re high), the central plot comes across as a “Remember when we did that?” story, instead of the important, influential experience in the protagonists’ lives that it tries to be.
But then, that might be a misinterpretation of the movie, or at least too literal a take on it. It feels a little like “Monsters University” sends the old cheesy message that we can do anything we put our minds to, no matter how much we’re told we can’t, but the stronger lesson here is about friendship. We can make connections even with the most different and distant people in our lives; we just have to be willing to extend the olive branch. And while that might not be much of an original moral either, the geniuses of Pixar succeed at making it feel new—just as they always have.
Danny Eisenberg is a 2010 graduate of the Bromfield School and is currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania.
