REVIEW: ‘Monsters’ takes backseat to ‘Toy Story’
When I was a child, my cousin and I used to spend summers together. Like other kids, we’d stay up nights and tell scary stories. Although this was not unusual for kids our age, the lengths to which we would go to out-scare each other were. We’d concoct wildly elaborate tales, fleshing them out, night after night down to the finest detail. And when they were complete, we’d try them out on other kids, including my brother. Unfortunately we were too successful. He began having nightmares that he couldn’t wake up from. I really should apologize for that.
Monsters, Inc. is not a scary movie, although the beginning seemed to be a little freaky to the youngsters in the theater. It does deal with the evils of corporate greed, which is almost always evil and definitely frightening, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
This is another offering from Pixar, the studio now famous for the Toy Story series. It stars John Goodman and Billy Crystal as Sully and Mike, two monsters who work the nine to five at the local scream extraction factory. It turns out Monstropolis (their home) is powered by the energy generated by children’s screams. But recently they’ve discovered that children are getting harder to scare – causing a shortage in screams and threatening the possibility of rolling blackouts throughout the city.
Two solutions present themselves. The first is posed by an evil corporate flunky and consists of capturing children, attaching them to a scream-extraction device and sucking the screams out of them. The other, unwittingly discovered by Sully and Mike, turns out to be a much more potent source of energy.
There are a lot of messages in this film if you want to look for them. Obviously they are playing off our own power-hungry society, whose demands for energy have sparked renewed debates about where that energy should come from. It also pokes fun at big corporations and the culture that exists within them by showing the competitive drive among the scariest monsters to break productivity records.
Of course, the main theme of this and every other Pixar film is providing smart entertainment for people of all ages to enjoy. Monsters succeeds at this, but not to the degree of its predecessors. Compared to Toy Story, this film seems to lack that special something – that hook which makes a film unique. The characters in Toy Story were toys, and as such created a different perspective in a world that was still familiar to the viewers. Conversely, this film shows us a strange world with run-of-the-mill characters. Aside from the fact that they were drawn to look like monsters, Sully and Mike could have been any working class duo who get caught up in a typical Hollywood whirlwind adventure.
But even if the characters were a bit flat, Pixar is improving technically with every film. Technical buffs will find no end of things to gape at. It boggles the mind when one comprehends the complexity of making a film like this. And just when we think Pixar has nowhere else to go, they show us. They keep proving what my cousin and I discovered during our ‘summer of fear’: That the imagination is the only real limitation we have left.
Grade: A-