Monsters University

A new Pixar film is still something I treasure, despite the company's recent dip in quality they remain the premier animation studio working today, a company with dedication to story and quality. But despite this I wasn't sure how much I was looking forward to Monsters University. I love the original film, but dislike prequels as a general concept, they generally reek of marketing gimmicks and cashing in on famous brands / names without actually narratively doing anything interesting. They are stories where you know the destination and as such they often feel inconsequential. This argument could be made against MU, for a start as a concept it's a little odd at first to base a film around a monster's desire to become a scarer, when you've already established in the original film that scaring is not what they should be doing, but ultimately it rises above this to become a worthwhile film in its own right.

The film follows Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) as he looks to fulfil his lifelong dream of studying at Monsters University, and sets out detailing how he meets James P Sullivan (John Goodman) and how a rivalry became a friendship. For the first two thirds the film largely concerns itself with the standard college comedy template, but given a Pixar, family friendly, twist. I wouldn't necessarily take this adherence to formula as a criticism, the characters are engaging enough, and the setting so wonderfully realised that it is a pleasure to just spend time in this world. But it's the last third that really makes the film, and elevates it from being a perfectly fine, but somewhat run of the mill Pixar entry, to one with a lot more on its mind. Because when it comes down to it the film isn't really about following your dreams and endorsing the popular message that you can do whatever you set your heart to. Instead, in a wonderfully subversive way, it points to something much more nuanced and interesting. It's a film about finding your place, but also about failure and how we respond to it. It's about what we do when things don't go our way, when our dreams fall apart, and the way it deals with those ideas in the context of this family movie about monsters that really surprised me.

It's a shame then that the first half of the film lacks much of this subtly and ambition, again it is perfectly entertaining and frequently very very funny, but it feels somewhat inconsequential and small scale, with the attachment we have to these characters from the first film doing much of the heavy lifting. There are some nice nods to the original however, and the film wisely steers away from just checking the boxes (this is how X happened, this is how Y got their job at the plant) which are so often the focus of other prequels. In fact the film's treatment of the only regular recurring character, Randall, is pretty effective, giving the audience all they need to know without making it the focus of the film.

On the scale of Pixar Monsters University still sits towards the lower end, all told, but that is largely as a result of the bar being set so high by the company's back catalogue. And whilst it may still feel slightly unnecessary as a film, I liked that they were able to take a potential cash-in and imbue it with a message and with heart that surprised me (unlike, say Cars 2). It is also far less uneven than last year's Brave and fills me with more hope for their upcoming Finding Dory. It's still a shame to see quite so many sequels emerge from a studio that made it's name with genre-bending original ideas, but Monsters University also sits as proof that we shouldn't write them off just yet.