Ever wonder about the sound that comes from your closet or that creepy shadow you see creeping across the room every night? Well, Pixar has given us all an answer in Monsters, Inc. A charming little movie, it provides a unique view on those figments of our imaginations that terrified most of us as small children.
In an alternate world from our own, monsters go to work each day, obeying the Stalk/Don’t Stalk signs as they wait to cross the streets. Many monsters work at Monsters, Inc., whose motto is "we scare because we care." Their job is to collect screams from human children to provide energy for their world. Unfortunately, human children are becoming harder and harder to scare as they become desensitized and the monster’s world is becoming afflicted with an energy shortage.
However, lovable blue giant Sully (John Goodman) is hard at work, trying to achieve a new scare record with the help of his little "all eyes" assistant, Mike (Billy Crystal).
But the monsters are almost more afraid of the children they’re scaring than the children are of them. Any object from the human realm incites great fear in any monsters in the area and requires decontamination, and never would a monster dream of letting a human child touch them.
And then it happens: Through a bungling of evil mechanizations on the part of Randall (Steve Buscemi), a small child, who Sully calls Boo (Mary Gibbs), manages to infiltrate the monster world and causes quite a stir. Then Sully and Mike stumble upon a sinister plot involving their boss, Waternoose (James Coburn), and find themselves in the middle of a lot of trouble.
Overall, the movie was decent. I would definitely say that it was geared more towards children than adults (previous Pixar films such as Toy Story seemed to be the other way around), but it was still funny. Most of the humor came in the form of one-liners and little spoofs of various films—definitely geared towards those with a short attention span.
There was an attempt to get serious in the film, but it was somewhat overdone and tended to detract from the overall cute factor of the movie. It didn’t last for too long, though, and soon enough, the plot line returned to general insanity.
The movie is worth seeing at some point, but for the majority of the reading audience that point will most likely be at UPAC or whenever you can rent it. If you do decide to go see it at the movie theaters, though, I suggest you aim for a time when the majority of the audience won’t be comprised of small children.
And don’t worry, "no monsters were harmed in the making of this film."
