Monsters University
/Rating-9/10
The good
-The humour
-The animation
-The story
-The designs
Monsters U follows Michael "Mike" Wazowski (Billy Crystal), a small monster who is desperate to stand out as a scarer of children, and James "Jimmy" Suliven (John Goodman), an arrogant slacker with a chip on his shoulder. The pair move from rivals to friends over the course of their first couple of semesters in a university for monsters where they learn to harness children's screams as a power source.
The humour is spot on, with nearly every joke getting a reaction. The animation too is spot on.
SPOILERS
The animation in the human world is so drastically different from the colourful monster world, that it actually makes it fairy scary, creating a fantastic contrast to the rest of the film and reinforcing the characters fear of the human world.
END OF SPOILERS
The story feels fairly typical of a university film; with a the jerky frat brothers, nerdy outcast frat which the main characters align with and the stern Dean with a grudge against the main characters, but is ultimately saved by the climax.
SPOILERS
The plot ultimately doesn't go the way you expect, with both Mike and Sully dropping out and having to work their way up to where they want to be in life. I honestly expected it to be more cliche, but I was thankfully surprised.
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The film included a lot of fantastic designs, in particular Dean Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren), who was a cross between a dragon, a millipede and a feminist lawyer. Other great characters included a hippy who is nothing but two arms with a face, and the librarian monster.
Monsters University is a fantastic film, feeling both funny and inventive if you can ignore some of the more glaring cliches.
A definite must see.
AS A PREQUEL
The film never feels like it's treading old ground, with the focus of the film shifting from the power of laughter over fear, to the psychology and analysis of fears power.
The human world is represented as the scary environment that the characters believed initially before the events of Monsters INC.
The callbacks to the original film are sparse enough that they don't feel like their more than nods and are shown in a way that makes old characters funny rather than distracting. Even the retuning characters like Mike, Sully and Randell are portrayed in a way that they feel like different characters, so it never feels old and allows the film to be its own thing.
