Before I saw this prequel to Monsters Inc. I was pretty sure it would be a mildly diverting, mostly formulaic cash-grab that really only exists because the original movie was such a merchandising hit. [The once inspired Pixar now seems primarily driven by selling toys, as evidenced by this and Cars 2.] And I was pretty much right, but that doesn’t mean the movie isn’t worth watching.
What Works: It’s almost impossible not to have a good time watching this thing. Perhaps only Tommy Lee Jones could watch such an inspired, jovial riff on college comedy cliches and keep from breaking a smile. Billy Crystal proves that he may now be a more welcome presence in voice only, and John Goodman’s weight loss (check him out in very recent films) actually does make this college-aged Sully sound younger than he did when he voiced the older one nearly a decade ago. And I like the idea of an animated prequel riddled with inside jokes…
What Doesn’t Work:…Not all of which land. It’s been so long since Monsters Inc. I really don’t remember it well, and that’s also because it’s one of Pixar’s most forgettable efforts (it’s probably my least favorite aside from the Cars films). Monsters University is better than Inc. but that’s not really good enough. Only a few years ago, Pixar was making animated movies about rats that dared to dream about being Parisian chefs (Ratatouille) and post-apocalyptic trash-collecting robots who must save humanity with the help of their cockroaches (the all-time best, Wall-E). What sapped their ambition? Toy Story was great, but that was a sequel and three years ago. Since then it’s been Cars 2, Brave, and now yet another sequel. The recent news that they want to make Finding Dorie (a, you guessed it, sequel to Finding Nemo) doesn’t fill one with high hopes for the future. I sure would hate to spend 2019 watching Up 2: More Damn Balloons and writing reviews about the “good old days” of Pixar when they actually invented new, ambitious worlds for adults as much as their kids.
What I Would Have Done Differently: It seems like the one film everyone and their brother has said Pixar needs to make a sequel to is The Incredibles, not Monsters Inc., not Cars, not even Finding Nemo. I’m not entirely sure The Incredibles needs a sequel (wouldn’t it just be repetitive? Isn’t half the fun of the first one the new universe it creates?), but it seems odd not to go in that direction. As Monsters University is, it works as well as can be expected except for a slightly moralistic undertone (some of the scenes towards the end especially) that feels a little too conventional for a Pixar film.