Animals House meets Monster Mash

After the Cars 2 debacle, there was some noticeable apprehension among Pixar fans when word trickled out that Monsters Inc. would get a prequel. So I won’t tease a riddle in front of you, I’ll just blurt it out: Monsters University is a worthy and spirited follow-up to a Pixar classic.

In short: Pixar didn’t ruin it. Not that the animation company, now a Disney property, has a habit of ruining things; it’s just dangerous to tinker with the classics, especially considering that Disney is now on something like Little Mermaid 4, Peter Pan 8 and many other direct-to-VHS cash-grabs.

Monsters University takes place many years before the scare-floor events of Monsters Inc., back when green one-eyed beach ball Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) and blue mammoth James P. Sullivan were starting college to become professional scarers. (In case you forgot, monsters frighten human children while they sleep to generate screams, which powers the monster world.) They both enroll at Monster’s University, the Harvard of scream. Mike, wide-eyed and book smart, naturally detests Sulley, a natural scarer whose dad left a tall MU legacy. A rivalry blossoms.

Like the first movie, University is endlessly inventive and witty. Invoking the spirit of college, it throws in all kinds of little college humor: hacky sack on the university lawn, reheated food at the union, secret fraternal orders with mysterious initiation ceremonies, that one kid who never took pen and paper to class, and lots of dorm-room horror. Shocker: Mike doesn’t room with Sulley, but with chameleon Randall (Steve Buscemi), who will go on to become the villain in the Monster’s timeline.

Sulley and Mike both enter the difficult scarer program, the most prestigious field of study at MU. Other fields include scare-can design, closet door fabrication and scare theory, but the top students all go on to be scarers, which is why Mike and Sulley compete against each other so fiercely. Eventually they’re booted from the program, though, after humiliating their professor, who looks like one of those terrifying mantis shrimp creatures. The only way they can get back into the program is by competing in the Scare Games, an intramural set of events organized by the fraternities and sororities, including Roar Omega Roar, a bunch of meatheads with popped shirt collars.

The lack of villains and any sort of heavy-handed conflict makes the film especially family friendly and light. There’s a silent fetch game in the library, a review of scare tactics, a maze of unfazed teens, a simulated bedroom with mannequin child, and a team race involving allergy-activating balls of thorns. The entire movie is rather harmless. Even its thrills late in the movie, at an all-girls summer sleep-away camp, are cheery and fun.

I especially enjoyed how the film focuses more on Mike (whereas Inc. more prominently featured Sulley) and his questionable career as a professional scarer. Mike’s a brilliant strategist, but his instincts on the scare floor are terrible. Mostly he’s just not frightening, which is the ultimate humiliation for a monster. The movie makes a case that not everyone can be the star player; sometimes we have to pass the ball to help the team most. It’s an inspirational message for Generation Me so I hope audiences admire the complexity at which it develops across the film’s vibrantly colored and pleasingly paced story. Sulley really drives it home late in the film as he tells Mike: “You may not be scary, but you’re fearless.”

Crystal and Goodman are solid performers, and their Mike and Sulley are two of the great Pixar pairings, right up there with Woody and Buzz. What surprised me most, though, was the rag-tag group of new characters in Mike and Sulley’s frat, Oozma Kappa: the two-headed Terry and Terri, pink sludge and momma’s boy Squishy, and Art, a Muppet-like goofball who will surely be a fan favorite. Squishy’s mother also has a prominent role, though always in the background. There she is doing laundry during the secret frat initiation rite. There she is listening to heavy metal with curlers in her monster do while she waits for her son and his new buddies to sneak into Monsters Inc., the company, not the movie. I found myself continuously howling at the spontaneous gags this movie threw at me.

Go see Monsters University. You will not see a more delightful animated movie this year. And if you ever waivered in your support of Pixar, let it earn it back now with this hilarious gem.

(As usual with a Pixar movie, I'm adding pretty much every photo that was made available to me. Expand the post three photos down to get the rest of the stills. Enjoy!)