Not bad, but underwhelming in some areas.

Rating: 6/10 (6 July 2013)

I honestly did not know what to expect going into this. I mean, I love the first Monsters Inc (most of us do, after all), but the idea of giving it a prequel does not sound like the best move for Pixar, at least in my opinion. And after seeing it, my thoughts are very mixed.
The first act revolves around Mike Wazowski's first days at college as he tries to prove to the world that, despite his physical appearance, he can be a true scarer if he studies hard. He then competes for the best results with classmate Sully, who is much more the 'cool' type of student and uses more instinctive measures. And after that gets wrapped up about 25 minutes into the movie, they just sort of move on to something else. A majority of the film afterward is about the duo competing in the Scare Games (which are basically various activities in a sports tone) with this other loser group of monsters, and they naturally have to overcome some extremely tough competition.
So, yeah, as you could probably tell from that description, this isn't a very flowing narrative. In fact, it's rather episodic when you get down to it. Because of this, the storytelling mostly comes out as kind of clumsy and occasionally even a little awkward. The stories do end up connecting to a fair extent, but the only two things that remain constant are Mike and Sully's relationship and Mike's desire to be seen as scary.
The execution has some pretty big problems in the first two thirds. The third I'll get to later. My first issue is the pacing. I can't really say it's that slow, but for the most part it just sort of meanders along and there are a lot of scenes where nothing of interest seems to be going on, and I found myself getting rather uninterested in the events fairly often. Another is that I think they put too much focus on the comedy. A majority of the non-main characters, such as Mike and Sully's Scare Games team and at least most of the background monsters, are pretty much just there to be funny. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but as much as I hate to say it, comedy was never one of Pixar's strongest suites. I mean, they did have me laughing every now and then, even in this one, but they were always much better at handling heart and drama. That said, I didn't find myself laughing that much in this film, or at least not as much as the rest of the audience was. Finally, the focus sometimes almost feels forgotten. I know I said earlier that the duo's relationship and Mike's goal are constant throughout, but even then, they don't dig into it as much as they should have. I was honestly pretty disappointed for the longest time.
SPOILER ALERT
But as the second act was ending, man did it pick up. After the team unfairly wins the Scare Games due to Sully's attempts to cheer Mike, the short, green student tries to prove himself yet again by going through a door portal that's still being tested. Unfortunately, this leads to a children's camp in the woods, and it's up to him and Sully to prevent Mike from being caught. This is where Pixar shows the true level of heart they were always great at, this is where they know how they want to tell the story, and this is where it actually gets legitimately interesting. It literally saved the movie from being a bore for me, and on top of that, we get a lot of nice little looks at many of the figures from the first film in the past.
END SPOILERS
Now, I'm not saying the first two thirds are total duds nor is the third act perfect. There are some things that are good and bad throughout the whole film. There's always some level of sympathy to be found, especially with Mike, and, from a prequel standpoint, it does do its job pretty well. What's constantly lacking, however, is that a majority of the characters seem rather generic. Even Mike and Sully don't really have much to them in terms of personality without the support they had in the first film. Also, the animation is not the best I've seen from Pixar in recent memory. I'm not saying it's bad, but there was nothing that I remember being amazed at, the designs I felt sometimes went over-the-top, and the setting didn't really open itself to creative visuals. And that's a shame, because top-quality CGI is pretty much Pixar's star quality.
The film as a whole is more-or-less a mixed bag. This is far from Pixar's best work, but it isn't their worst either. It does contain that clever third act, but I still got to sit through the slow and empty parts and it's hard for me to even say whether or not it's worth the wait upon re-watching. Despite this, however, unless you didn't like the first Monsters Inc for whatever reason, I see no reason not to at least check it out. You may end up liking this film a lot more than I did. I was just not as invested as the film wants me to be.