Monsters University

Now we have come to the only prequel Pixar has done (unless they plan to do more), “Monsters University,” released in 2013.

Matt Zoller Seitz started his review out by saying, “If you were worried that animation giant Pixar was dipping into the same old wells too often ("Toy Story 3," "Cars 2," et al), the announcement of a prequel to their 2001 hit "Monsters, Inc." might have given you pause. Luckily, the result is more than reassuring. "Monsters University", which pictures Billy Crystal's one-eyed goblin Mike and John Goodman's fuzzy blue scare-master Sully as students attending Scare U, is true to the spirit of the original film, "Monsters Inc.", and matches its tone. But it never seems content to turn over old ground.”

The movie starts with a short introduction showing Mike as a young monster. He’s not what you would say is natural. He’s a great student, one of those types that gets good grades but doesn’t have what would showcase the special talents. Sully, who eventually becomes friends with Mike at college, is the opposite. He’s the son of a family praised for having generations of famous scare monsters, breezing through education on his name. However, Sully’s one of those students who only succeeds because everything comes easily for him. When Mike and Sully try to enter the college’s “Scare Program” by winning the annual college scaring competition – to avoid getting put into a “boring” career path, like building scream canisters – their strengths and weaknesses are evident. Mike wants to be the best scarer the same way, as Seitz puts it best, “a tiny, chubby kid wants to be in the NBA.” There’s hope for him, but not in the way he thinks. Sully is Mike’s opposite. He’s lazy and a smarty-pants. He doesn’t have as much of a thought as some of his fellow college students think, and he’s so scared of failing that he’s made underachieving into a type of self-protective performance talent. (The first time Mike meets him, Sully tips into a class that’s already started, without school material.)

Seitz mentioned, “You'll notice that I've already said quite a bit about the two main characters, and I haven't even gotten to a summary of the plot yet. That's because Sully and Mike are such richly-drawn individuals, so fully imagined in terms of psychology, body language and vocal performance, that they feel more "real" than the live-action heroes in almost any current summer blockbuster you can name. This is a specific Pixar talent, and for all the goodwill that the company has generated over the years, they still don't get enough credit for it. Sully's thinner in this film than he was in the first one, and he has the jockish, meathead energy of the young Nick Nolte. Look at how he slouches semi-sideways in classroom desk chairs, or tilts his strong jaw while half-listening, like a man (er, monster) who was told as a child that he had a nice face and never forgot it. Look at Mike's schlumpy posture, his permanent-wedgie walk, and how he shrugs as if warding off blows that it hasn't occurred to anyone to deliver yet. These touches and others are marvelous, and they go a long way toward making the central relationship equal to, yet different from, Mike and Sully's friendship in "Monsters Inc."”

The supporting characters are just as colorful. Seitz said, “Like characters in a classic Preston Sturges or Ernst Lubitsch comedy, they enter the film as caricatures and emerge as fully-formed individuals, the sorts of people (monsters!) that you'd remember fondly if you knew them in life.” The members of Oozma Kappa, the unpopular fraternity on campus – the only one that accepted Mike and Sully – are a shabby group, the classic underdogs of sports movie cliché, but they’re physically strange, a group of effervescent drawings. There’s a superficially permanent student with an upside-down bat wing for a mustache (Joe Murray), an overweight salesman who’s older than some of the teachers (Peter Sohn). There’s a spazzy clown who’s pretty much a pair of legs and a face (he definitely can breakdance, though), voiced by Charlie Day. There’s a two-headed monster whose heads argue with one another (one head wants to be a dance major, the other doesn’t), voiced by Sean Hayes and Dave Foley. There’s an eligible fraternity that tries to recruit Sully, with a self-centered leader whose boastful chest and melon head shrink his stick legs, voiced by Nathan Fillion, and a super-competitive sorority full of laughing monsters who dress in pink and seem vivacious and innocuous until you see their eyes light up with a, according to Seitz, “hellish intensity that would frighten Medusa herself.”

The dean of this college is the dragon-winged, centipede-bodied Dean Hardscrabble, voiced by the great Hellen Mirren in one of the best voiceovers ever. She’s the founder of Monsters University who made the Scare Program and the scaring contest, which takes place over several days in a wide arrange of scary and polychromatic settings. Seitz mentioned, “Hardscrabble seems to have been modeled on John Houseman in "The Paper Chase." She's an imperious, intimidating master instructor who brooks no fools, but she pays such close attention to every student's progress that deep down you know that her withering putdowns are a form of toughlove, a way of testing her charges and making sure they have thick skins, or hides, or scales.”

“Monsters University” is the type of film that’s easy to underrate. It’s not deep, nor is it trying to be, but its aims are frequent and diverse, and it succeeds every one of them with charm. If you’ve ever seen a sports movie, you know how everything unfolds, and the movie does every cliché you’d think. However, it never comes the most obvious way, and it’s so familiar to the way today’s audiences watch genre films that there are moments when it looks to expect out doubts and fool them around so that it can answer them later, to our approval and enjoyment. (When a moment feels a little off, there’s a reason for it being that way.)

The script consists of lines that are quotable not only because they’re funny (many are) but because they’re smart, like when Mike tells Sully, during an inspirational trip to watch the workers at Monsters Incorporated, “The best scarers use their differences to their advantage,” and Mike’s addition, a reaction to watching a legendary and now primitive scaremaster do his work, “He doesn’t have the speed anymore, but his technique is flawless.” Seitz mentioned, “My former colleague Manohla Dargis was right to object to Pixar's decision to tell yet another guy-centric story after releasing the quietly revolutionary "Brave" — but considering the warmth and intelligence radiating from every frame of this film, it's far from a dealbreaker.” There’s a politeness and precision of spirit to “Monsters University” which, at a moment of tiresomely “dark” and “gritty” entertainment, is, as Seitz puts it, “as bracing as a cannonball-dive into a pool on a hot summer's day.”

Never do you get the idea that director Dan Scanlon, his cowriters, his voice cast, or his team of animators are putting our love for the first film in the area of real imagination. Every moment has five or six things worth liking: a great line, a shameless but skillfully timed sight one-liner, a crowd of borderline details, or a masterpiece or camera move that connects the movie with three genres it most often appeals, the coming-of-age story, the campus comedy, and the sports movie. Seitz said, “Randy Newman's drumline-saturated score recalls Elmer Bernstein's classic work on "Animal House" and "Stripes", but so subtly that it takes a moment to register what he's doing. There are times when the film is juggling so many different kinds of pleasure simultaneously that when it adds one more unexpectedly perfect touch, the whole scene seems to erupt like a string of firecrackers. (My favorite occurs during a wild infiltration-and-escape sequence, when a character you'd never expect to say such a thing shrieks, "I can't go back to jail!")”

Seitz mentioned, “That the film may also teach children, and perhaps remind grownups, what it truly means to be honest, honorable, loyal and fair is a bonus, but to my mind a big one.” When the characters cut corners, they’re punished in ways that seem very reasonable, given they get caught. If they don’t get caught, their principles punish them – and the characters that obviously don’t have principles are the ones that the movie treats most severely. Seitz said, “The film's lessons are never self-congratulatory, and they're always backed by real empathy for human — or in this case, monstrous — frailties.”

In its own nicely easy-going way, this is great family entertainment. Pixar may not have what it had before, but its technique is flawless.

There is one flaw of the movie that I have to bring up: in “Monsters, Inc.,” there’s a line in the beginning of the movie where Mike said to Sully, “You’ve been jealous of my good looks since the fourth grade.” If that line established that they were friends since the fourth grade, why in this prequel they are showing them meeting for the first time? That’s something that’s always made me think ever since I saw this film.

Aside from that, this is a good prequel. It’s not as good as “Monsters, Inc.” obviously, but it’s actually a prequel children can watch first before they see the original. Now you might be thinking: shouldn’t they see “Monsters, Inc.” first before popping this in the DVD player? True, but this is actually an acceptable prequel to watch first since it established everything up to where “Monsters, Inc.” started. So if you hadn’t been happy with a couple of the Pixar movies before this, definitely give this one a watch because it’s actually good. Although I do agree there could have been possibilities for a sequel as opposed to a prequel, but who knows if Pixar has that planned yet.

Stay tuned on Sunday when I review a Christmas special that I have mentioned before, although I’m sure I’m going to loathe it entirely.