cinema. From Toy Story to Toy Story 3, Pixar's winning streak expanded
our ideas of storytelling. But Pixar's latest, Monsters University, is
more evidence Pixar's glory days might be over. It's not a masterpiece
— just one of the best films of the summer.
Minor spoilers ahead...
Monsters University is a delightful film, which manages to do the
near-impossible: create a prequel where you still feel some suspense,
even though you know how these characters are going to turn out. It
takes a lot of clichés and makes them fresh (both the monster tropes
from the first movie, and the "college movie" clichés it's taking on.)
It has a lovely eye for detail and some great character moments, along
with real surprises.
But Monsters University doesn't do for Monsters Inc. what the two Toy
Story sequels did for Toy Story. It doesn't take the themes of the
original and flip them so we see them a new way. This new film doesn't
feel like an essential part of the first movie's world, just a fun
addition. It's not quite as heart-breaking or thrilling as the
absolute best Pixar movies.You can make a case that the greatest Pixar
films did something transformative with genre — they would pick up
genre archetypes and use them to tell a story that felt personal and
surprising enough to become brand new. They expanded and redefined the
genres they touched on — for example, The Incredibles still stands
alone as an exploration of superheroes as family and as public
figures. The real legacy of Pixar is the ways in which it kept
surprising us with genres we've seen before.
So in case you missed the trailers and stuff, Monsters University is
the story of how Mike and Sulley, the main characters of Monsters,
Inc., met as college freshmen. Both Mike and Sulley want to become
"scarers," the job which Sulley has in Monsters Inc., and meanwhile
they get drawn into the rivalry between college fraternities. The
"nerd fraternity" Oozma Kappa is up against the "cool kid" fraternity
Roar Omega Roar, led by Johnny Worthington III (Nathan Fillion).
So Monsters University has two strikes against it, right off the bat:
It's a prequel, and we already know how Mike and Sulley turned out.
And it's doing a pastiche of movies that the adults in the audience
have seen before, like Revenge of the Nerds, with the monster stuff
sort of glued on to the "frat kid" stuff. The movie does a lot of gags
you've seen before, only with a slight monstery twist to them. (Sort
of the same way Toy Story 3 did a riff on "great escape" movies,
except here it's a bit less inventive.)And more than that, it feels
like there's no reason for Monsters University to exist — in the wake
of Cars 2 and the upcoming Planes, it feels as though Pixar's parent
company Disney is just monetizing its most popular properties as fast
as possible. Watching Monsters University go through the motions of
telling a rote story, you do start to get the feeling that the
studio's days of towering over all other animation companies are
waning somewhat.
And yet, this film is still better than anything else I've seen
lately. By a long chalk.
For one thing, as I mentioned, the movie does manage to pack some
surprises — and in fact, the movie finds ways to twist the knife a few
times, in ways that actually catch you off guard.
And you care enough about the characters — especially poor Mike, who
wears his heart on his sleeve — enough that you're caught up in the
suspense of their coming-of-age tale, even as a lot of the narrative
turns feel both familiar and predictable. The characters are grounded
enough, and emotionally intense enough, that you do get swept up in
their quest to get the most important job in the
monster-world.Watching Mike and Sulley start out as rivals, and turn
into friends, provides a lot of the emotional backbone of the movie,
along with Mike's desperation to prove that he's really a scary
monster. Both of those through-lines provide some lovely scenes, and
this movie never loses track of how both of these characters are
growing up, from scene to scene and moment to moment. The bits where
Sulley becomes less of a self-centered jerk, or Mike starts to
confront his limitations, are magical.
And the gorgeous visuals in this movie also help to suck you into the
story and avoid the sense of going through the motions — as you'd
expect from a college campus full of monsters, there's some great
interplay between light and shadow on the MU campus. The sound design
in this film also works with Randy Newman's drum-heavy score to create
a sense of jangling energy, as well as a world where anything can
happen. As usual with Pixar, there's a great sense of texture, with
the monsters' slimy skins, carapaces and furs feeling almost
tactile.And even though this movie won't revolutionize the Monsters
Inc. world — perhaps because the first movie ends by revolutionizing
things so thoroughly — we do get to see a new dimension to the
universe of monsters and their scaring industry. Over the course of
the movie, Mike and Sulley both study scare theory, and we delve into
notions of just what is scary, and how much a scare is dependent on
the particular audience. The "scare theory" stuff is the closest this
movie really comes to being able to expand the themes and ideas of the
first movie.
And without giving anything away, the ending of the film isn't at all
what I was expecting — there's actually a clever enough twist that you
might well be caught off guard by how things turn out.All in all,
Monsters University is a pretty terrific film — probably more solid
than Iron Man 3, and thus my favorite movie of the summer thus far.
What it isn't, is a brilliant piece of storytelling that stands up
with the first 15 years of Pixar movies. It's very much a perfectly
executed film, but it's not as amazing as the movie it's following up.
It serves its genre tropes rather than mastering them, and it fails to
transcend the Monsters Inc. legacy in the way that the Toy Story
sequels did. In other words, it's just a really superb Disney movie
rather than a great Pixar movie.
Edited to add: I changed the headline slightly to make it clearer what
I'm saying here. I do think, after Monsters University, Brave and Cars
2, that we're probably seeing the end of a "golden age" of Pixar, when
the company loomed over all other animation studios. But that really
is okay. Because even though Pixar seems to be maturing into a studio
that's more like others in the space, we're still getting great films.
And maybe maturity will have an upside we haven't seen yet.
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