It is a fairly depressing fact of modern cinema viewing that to see a vaguely mature mainstream Hollywood film that doesn’t have a stereotypical teenage heavy metal fans obsession with sex, drugs, violence and bad language limits you mainly to films aimed mainly at kids. However a film like Monsters Inc. has the ability to charm you, albeit briefly, into thinking that banning all films requiring more than a ‘U’ certificate would be a positive thing.
The latest film from Pixar, the computer animation nerds come good behind Toy Story and A Bugs Life, is set in a parallel world which is powered by the screams of young children, which are collected by the scarer employees of Monsters Inc. on trips through specially made doors into the human world. All is good for top scarer team Sully and Mike until a child inadvertently enters the monsters world and causes chaos as children are considered highly toxic there.
It goes without saying that the animation in the film is on the whole incredible, so I will on the whole avoid mentioning it. However despite having the most complex and realistic human shirt even rendered (yawn) the human child is about as believable as a 1980s Cabbage Patch doll. This is the first time the Pixar team have had a human lead character and it is clear that they either don’t feel it is worth spending millions attempting to create realistic humans (as in film-makings answer to insomnia, Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within) or they have spent so long in front of their computers they’ve forgotten what real people look like. Either way having such a clearly fake child only helps make the wondrous fantasy world of Monstropolis all the easier to lose yourself into.
Of course a film with great animation and no story would be about as interesting as a personal demonstration of Windows XP with a Bill Gates fanatic. However the sharp script builds upon the cute visuals to create a charming whole and there are so many visual gags thrown into the film that you have to avoid the temptation to duck. The comic interplay between Billy Crystal and John Goodman in the lead roles is as tighter than than a bank manager who zipped up his flies too quickly and the unflagging pace papers over the one dimensional characters and predictable ending.