Monsters Inc. 

My God, they’ve done it yet again.  Pixar is the best studio in Hollywood.  They’ve made four movies, and they’re all great.  The newest one, Monsters Inc., is a touch below the classic Toy Story movies, but it’s nonetheless wildly inventive, visually stunning and incredibly funny, as well as deeply touching. 

The story takes place in the bizarro Gotham of Monstropolis.  Monsters Inc. is the local power company, which uses the screams of human children as fuel.  The problem is, kids aren’t as easy to scare these days, so the company is dangerously low on power.  Their #1 producer is good hearted, hard working James P. “Sulley” Sullivan (John Goodman), assisted by one-eyed Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal).  But hot on their heels is a nasty chameleon named Randall (Steve Buscemi) who’s just a little too into his work. 

The trouble starts when Sulley accidentally brings a little girl (which he names Boo) back into the monster world with him.  See, children are toxic, and any monster that touches one suffers a most rigorous decontamination process.  Sulley just wants to get Boo back home without causing any more trouble, but that turns out to be much easier said than done.

I loved the whole setup of the parallel universe link into our world.  It was like an assembly line.  A door is lowered into a frame, the monster goes in, scares the kid, the fuel is stored, the door is removed, a new one is put in its place, repeat.  It was also a nice touch to have the monsters actually be very pleasant beings, save for perhaps Randall.  Crystal, thankfully, was in second to third gear with his schtick, and that made a world of difference.  Goodman makes just about everyone around him better, and this is no exception.  But what made this movie so enjoyable for me, though it bordered on mushiness, was the little girl Boo.  If I thought for a second that my kids would be like her (instead the more likely outcome. Sid from Toy Story), I’d have ten of them.  Kidding, Deb, Kidding. I’d have six.

The movie is not without its flaws, however.  There was a point made early on about the true power within children that they stepped around to the point of awkwardness.  There was also a flaw in logic regarding destroying a link between Monstropolis and our world, but it was not so glaring that it distracted from the movie.  And besides, the roller coaster type sequence that this scene took place in more than made up for the oversight.

You gotta hand it to Pixar.  No studio has their track record of 4-4 with four home runs.  They may have hit this one in the shortest part of the park, but it’s a homer just the same.  Monsters Inc. has everything I wish Shrek had been.  It’s subtle, it’s clever, and best of all, it’s not patronizingly simpleminded.  Hooray for making a movie that doesn’t lean on the lowest common denominator.