Recycling of old college clichés

Rating: Null/10 (11 December 2019)

Monsters University is a prequel to the acclaimed Pixar film, Monsters Inc. In it we meet our two main leads, Mike and Sully, during their college days and witness how they became friends in the first place.
Leaving aside the fact that in the original film it was said that Mike and Sully had known each other since elementary school, this is not an awful premise for a story. Granted, I would have rather had a true sequel, where we could perhaps skip to the future and see Boo as a teenager, or even an adult. But a college comedy is fine. It's fine....
Truth be told, what bothers me to most about this film is how utterly unoriginal it is. If you've seen any college comedy in your life, you've seen this film. Sure, all the characters are monsters, but aside from that they're such cardboard cutouts. We have the jocks, we have the nerdy outsiders, we have the girl group, we have the strict teacher, we have the goths, we have them all.
And nothing interesting is done with them. We even have Randall Boggs, one of the villains of the original film, in his younger form. And he starts out as this geeky, awkward guy, who's super nice to everybody. That could have been so hilarious and so interesting. But nope, goes absolutely nowhere. It's like they forget to tell a joke with him.
Still, the animation is nice, there are some good scenes, the character concepts have creativity to them, and even the story is merely bland rather than outright bad. Do I wish they had done something more with this idea? Yes. Do I think it's not worth a watch. Well... no, not really. It's still Pixar.