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Monsters, Inc.
Pixar follows up Toy Story 2 with this endearing tale of monsters in a cupboard who gather the screams of children. Voice talent includes John Goodman, Billy Crystal and Steve Buscemi
It's a great premise. There are actually monsters in the cupboard - they come from another world and use children's screams as a power source for their city of Monstropolis. Among them are buddies Mike Wazowski (Crystal) and James P 'Sulley' Sullivan (Goodman), employees of power-generating corporation Monsters, Inc. (Motto: "We scare because we care"). It's their job to harvest the screams - Sulley, a huge, furry beast, is the company's champion 'Scarer', while little, green, one-eyed Mike is his 'Scare Assistant', cuing up the doorways that magically lead into children's bedrooms and coaching Sulley. Unfortunately there's a power crisis because "Kids these days, they just don't get scared like they used to". To make matters worse, the scheming of nasty colleague Randall Bogs (Buscemi) has resulted in a child getting into Monstropolis, a terrifying prospect as kids are considered toxic. Although panic ensues, Sulley and Mike discover the child (Gibbs, an actual four-year-old, not an adult actor going goo-goo) is harmless. While trying to send her home, Sulley grows affectionate toward the child he names Boo. Furthermore, the friends discover nefarious goings on at the company... Fans of the Toy Story films won't be disappointed by Monsters, Inc.. It has the same distinctive combination of great characterisation and energetic visual inventiveness. It's funny and endearing, but its strengths are more in the 'physical' humour than in the dialogue, which isn't as rich in wit as Pixar's previous outings. For Boo, Monstropolis is just a huge playground, so it's her scrapes and the efforts of Sulley and Mike to keep her in hand that drive the film. She wriggles off, they chase her; she falls into the hands of the bad guy, they frantically try to save her. This caper-style slapstick is the engine of the film. The backbone of the story is a simple yarn, similar to Maurice Sendak's children's classic 'Where The Wild Things Are' (sharing the conceit of a child disguised as a monster to living among them). But like the Toy Story films, and DreamWorks' Shrek, Monsters, Inc. is a reinvention of children's stories for a generation living with readily accessible violence and horror from TV and videogames (ie kids that don't scare so easily) and shifting family structures (Sulley essentially becomes Boo's single parent). Meanwhile, the superficial lesson for (younger) kids is to not be afraid. It's a lesson given in a reliably colourful, fun, funny manner. |
