Monsters University

Over a 15-year spree, Pixar made an indelible mark on the history of

cinema. From Toy Story to Toy Story 3, Pixar's winning streak expanded

our ideas of storytelling. But Pixar's latest, Monsters University, is

more evidence Pixar's glory days might be over. It's not a masterpiece

— just one of the best films of the summer.



Minor spoilers ahead...

Monsters University is a delightful film, which manages to do the

near-impossible: create a prequel where you still feel some suspense,

even though you know how these characters are going to turn out. It

takes a lot of clichés and makes them fresh (both the monster tropes

from the first movie, and the "college movie" clichés it's taking on.)

It has a lovely eye for detail and some great character moments, along

with real surprises.



But Monsters University doesn't do for Monsters Inc. what the two Toy

Story sequels did for Toy Story. It doesn't take the themes of the

original and flip them so we see them a new way. This new film doesn't

feel like an essential part of the first movie's world, just a fun

addition. It's not quite as heart-breaking or thrilling as the

absolute best Pixar movies.You can make a case that the greatest Pixar

films did something transformative with genre — they would pick up

genre archetypes and use them to tell a story that felt personal and

surprising enough to become brand new. They expanded and redefined the

genres they touched on — for example, The Incredibles still stands

alone as an exploration of superheroes as family and as public

figures. The real legacy of Pixar is the ways in which it kept

surprising us with genres we've seen before.



So in case you missed the trailers and stuff, Monsters University is

the story of how Mike and Sulley, the main characters of Monsters,

Inc., met as college freshmen. Both Mike and Sulley want to become

"scarers," the job which Sulley has in Monsters Inc., and meanwhile

they get drawn into the rivalry between college fraternities. The

"nerd fraternity" Oozma Kappa is up against the "cool kid" fraternity

Roar Omega Roar, led by Johnny Worthington III (Nathan Fillion).



So Monsters University has two strikes against it, right off the bat:

It's a prequel, and we already know how Mike and Sulley turned out.

And it's doing a pastiche of movies that the adults in the audience

have seen before, like Revenge of the Nerds, with the monster stuff

sort of glued on to the "frat kid" stuff. The movie does a lot of gags

you've seen before, only with a slight monstery twist to them. (Sort

of the same way Toy Story 3 did a riff on "great escape" movies,

except here it's a bit less inventive.)And more than that, it feels

like there's no reason for Monsters University to exist — in the wake

of Cars 2 and the upcoming Planes, it feels as though Pixar's parent

company Disney is just monetizing its most popular properties as fast

as possible. Watching Monsters University go through the motions of

telling a rote story, you do start to get the feeling that the

studio's days of towering over all other animation companies are

waning somewhat.



And yet, this film is still better than anything else I've seen

lately. By a long chalk.



For one thing, as I mentioned, the movie does manage to pack some

surprises — and in fact, the movie finds ways to twist the knife a few

times, in ways that actually catch you off guard.



And you care enough about the characters — especially poor Mike, who

wears his heart on his sleeve — enough that you're caught up in the

suspense of their coming-of-age tale, even as a lot of the narrative

turns feel both familiar and predictable. The characters are grounded

enough, and emotionally intense enough, that you do get swept up in

their quest to get the most important job in the

monster-world.Watching Mike and Sulley start out as rivals, and turn

into friends, provides a lot of the emotional backbone of the movie,

along with Mike's desperation to prove that he's really a scary

monster. Both of those through-lines provide some lovely scenes, and

this movie never loses track of how both of these characters are

growing up, from scene to scene and moment to moment. The bits where

Sulley becomes less of a self-centered jerk, or Mike starts to

confront his limitations, are magical.



And the gorgeous visuals in this movie also help to suck you into the

story and avoid the sense of going through the motions — as you'd

expect from a college campus full of monsters, there's some great

interplay between light and shadow on the MU campus. The sound design

in this film also works with Randy Newman's drum-heavy score to create

a sense of jangling energy, as well as a world where anything can

happen. As usual with Pixar, there's a great sense of texture, with

the monsters' slimy skins, carapaces and furs feeling almost

tactile.And even though this movie won't revolutionize the Monsters

Inc. world — perhaps because the first movie ends by revolutionizing

things so thoroughly — we do get to see a new dimension to the

universe of monsters and their scaring industry. Over the course of

the movie, Mike and Sulley both study scare theory, and we delve into

notions of just what is scary, and how much a scare is dependent on

the particular audience. The "scare theory" stuff is the closest this

movie really comes to being able to expand the themes and ideas of the

first movie.



And without giving anything away, the ending of the film isn't at all

what I was expecting — there's actually a clever enough twist that you

might well be caught off guard by how things turn out.All in all,

Monsters University is a pretty terrific film — probably more solid

than Iron Man 3, and thus my favorite movie of the summer thus far.

What it isn't, is a brilliant piece of storytelling that stands up

with the first 15 years of Pixar movies. It's very much a perfectly

executed film, but it's not as amazing as the movie it's following up.

It serves its genre tropes rather than mastering them, and it fails to

transcend the Monsters Inc. legacy in the way that the Toy Story

sequels did. In other words, it's just a really superb Disney movie

rather than a great Pixar movie.



Edited to add: I changed the headline slightly to make it clearer what

I'm saying here. I do think, after Monsters University, Brave and Cars

2, that we're probably seeing the end of a "golden age" of Pixar, when

the company loomed over all other animation studios. But that really

is okay. Because even though Pixar seems to be maturing into a studio

that's more like others in the space, we're still getting great films.

And maybe maturity will have an upside we haven't seen yet.