At the movies

Monsters University
DIRECTED BY: Dan Scanlon
VOICES: Billy Crystal, John Goodman, Helen Mirren
CERT: G

The once-mighty Pixar has been going through a bit of a slump. Brave was a popular, Oscar-winning hit, but it was well below the studio’s high standard and Cars 2 was really little more than a cynical merchandising commercial. The former kings of animation were badly in need of a killer comeback.
Disappointingly, though perhaps understandably, they’ve decided against exploring new territory, opting instead to further plunder their own back catalogue, digging up their greatest hits. And they don’t come much greater than Monsters Inc.

It’s 12 years now since Mike and Sully’s adventures on the scare floor and I imagine if you took a poll among fans of the film as to how a sequel should go down, the most common response would be, “Sequel? Get up the yard with your sequel!”

But if it simply had to be done (and Disney/Pixar clearly felt it did), most fans would probably want to know what Sully saw when he opened that closet door at the end. We’d want to catch up with Boo, see how the dreaded teenage years are treating her.

We might even go for the notion of Mike and Sully getting trapped in the terrifying human world. There’s a few intriguing options there and the old Pixar might have gone down those roads.

But these are strange days for us all and the lads have chosen instead to follow in the footsteps of George Lucas and, God help us, Christopher Nolan. They have decided to make a prequel, an origins story. Because, well, that’s where it’s at.

So we catch up with the monster duo in their college years, long before they were best buddies, the finest scare team in town.

Mike (Crystal) the green cyclops has dreamed all his life of being in the Monsters University elite Scare Program. He’s a bit of a swot, an expert on the art of scaring. He’s just not very good at the practical stuff.

His new roommate Sully (Goodman), the blue and purple giant, comes from good monster stock and has an epic roar. He’s not much of a student but he has a great future in scaring the bejaysus out of children.

The boys don’t exactly hit it off, but they’re forced to team up when they end up getting thrown off the program by Dean Hardscrabble (Mirren), a winged centipede who might have flown off the pages of Harry Potter.

To save their academic careers, the twosome must win the Scare Games, the kind of contest you might have seen a few times before, in everything from Billy Madison to last week’s The Internship.

Though this one probably owes more to Revenge of the Nerds. In order to enter the contest, Mike and Sully must join a new fraternity – and the only option left is Oozma Kappa, the lamest, unscariest bunch of geek-monsters on campus. Up against the finest young scarers in the land, their prospects are slim.

There’s a fair bit of fun in all of this – some very sharp writing, good visual gags and that fine comic chemistry between the lead monsters, the Odd Couple of animation. And as you would expect (though, strangely, we hardly notice anymore), it’s a visual delight. The sheer array of creatures and the weird and intricate details of their design (not to mention their surroundings) is brilliant – if at times it feels like watching a bag of Skittles come to life. Kids will no doubt love every second of it and in fairness, a middling Pixar film is still a cut above most of the rest.

Yet, Monsters University is a bit disappointing. At its finest – which used to mean, at its most basic – Pixar’s storytelling is original, inventive, full of heart, bursting with imagination and always surprising. The new Monsters is blatantly lacking in most of those ingredients, director Dan Scanlon and his writers settling instead for a safe, bland, straightforward story borrowed from other sources, with hardly a blip on its tired, predictable plotline. It’s a vanilla ice cream on a hot day – it’s grand, it does the trick, but you won’t be jumping up and down about it.

There are no new memorable characters to speak of, either – certainly no one with the emotional depth of our old friend Boo. Her presence is missed here, though all said, it’s probably best she remains a mystery, a fond little memory. Though I wouldn’t entirely count on Pixar leaving her alone.

In the meantime, they’re rummaging through the archives again and will return to the ocean next year with Finding Dory – in which a team of depressed super heroes is implanted in the dreams of a fish, with disastrous results for her short-term memory.

Pixar is furiously denying rumours that Christopher Nolan is involved.