Why I Saw It: I like to see an animated feature from time to time [despite all the loud children] and Pixar is as reliable a studio as one is going to find.
[Voice] Cast: I can barely comment of live-action performances, so there wasn't much for me to pick at here. Billy Crystal and John Goodman are both fine. The main compliment I have is that at no time (other than waiting for John Ratzenberger to show up and thinking "is that Aubrey Plaza) did I find myself thinking about the voice-actor for the character, so I suppose that means the characters were well fleshed out.
Plot: Like most Pixar movies, the story is pretty straight-forward. Twists aren't their thing. They prefer effective story-telling. It's basically a rivals become friends and a rag-tag bunch of misfits beats the odds story mashed together. Perhaps because I don't remember the first movie all that well, some of the events toward the end surprised me, including a resolution to Mike's story which was written for every Scottie Pippen of the world to feel better about himself. Personally, I say it a bit as a cop-out, but there's a solid message in there regardless.
Animation: The short at the beginning, The Blue Umbrella is gorgeous. It took a while for me to even realize that it was all animation (as opposed to animation on top of a filmed backdrop). The feature movie looked fine. You can definitely see a great improvement from 2001. Overall though, since it takes place in a very fictional world, it looks a lot more animated than other movies, which is fine. It just doesn't have anything as showy as Merida's hair.
Elephant in the Room: Did this need a prequel? Pixar movies are at their best when they have two things: a good message and a topic ripe with jokes. Toy Story always had a gut punch of a theme and a ridiculously endless supply of gags about toys. Finding Nemo dealt with loss and had an ocean's worth of material. Up basically ruins you within 10 minutes and mines the dog jokes wonderfully. Thematically, I think Monsters U. falls a little short in that it has a much more sobering message than I expected (you can't be anything you want, so accept what you are good at isn't too inspiring). The first movie exhausted most of the monster humor, so all the fun in the screenplay went toward the college stuff, which I thought was lackluster or overly-tread material.
To Sum Things Up:
Look. Pixar is in a tough place. They are haunted by their own ghosts. No company can continue being as good as they were for a solid decade. Expectations as so high for them. had this come out 10 years ago, people would say this is another solid effort by Pixar. Now, people are wondering if Pixar has lost the magic. Monsters U. is a perfectly amiable movie, great family entertainment, and certainly not a creative low for the studio. It's just not as good as previous outings.
Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend
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