This film was awful and torture to watch! Just kidding, I didn't get nightmares from it.

Rating: 8/10 (26 June 2020)

Some people hate Monsters University because it glamorizes the art of giving children nightmares, and making children scared of monsters when most monsters who aren't Randall are not usually scary or dangerous people. However, I never really took that as an issue in spite of that moment in Monsters Inc when Boo cries after watching James Sullivan scare the fake training room kid, because both of these Pixar Monsters movies were meant to explain why monsters would come out of our closet to scare us, and how that all works when the monsters can not live in our closet all the time. And most non-villainous monsters don't want to torture or kidnap their children, either. I do not believe that this prequel is a generic 1980s college film, especially because most colleges, real or in film, do not teach the subject of scaring children for electricity. At first I did not like to watch this film in theaters because I thought Monsters Inc should have some second, and it would mean that I would have to watch the older film again, but when I watched Monsters U. more and more times, and heard from Seamus Gorman about it on December 21, 2016, I realized how well it works as a prequel, and despite the cleaner-looking animation and newer names in the prequel cast like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Charlie Day (2005), or Parks and Recreation's Aubrey Plaza (2009), it really feels like the first Monsters movie the more time I spend on it. It did a great job of exploring the origins of Mike, Sulley and Randall before Monsters Incorporated. I really wish James Coburn survived into 2013 and didn't have a heart attack so we could have a scene of Waternoose accepting Mike and Sulley into his company after the substitute voice of Stinky Pete dropped out at the last minute, but I am sure it would not have been as great as the ending Seamus thought up. He should have qualified them straight to scare tryouts almost instantly for pulling off such an epic scare! Even though Steve Susskind and Joe Ranft did not live to see this prequel, I am grateful that at least Daniel Gerson survived into 2016 so he could write this prequel for 2013 as well as Big Hero 6, in 2014.
Another cool thing of note that makes Monsters U feel like a prequel to the 2001 Monsters Inc film is that, despite coming out in 2013, they frequently use old-fashioned Polaroid cameras seldom seen during and after 2013, and the Monsters Incorporated Scoreboard has flipping cards of letters and numbers, while the original 2001 Monsters Inc film is a lot more advanced than that with its digital numbers and pictures of monsters that can automatically switch at any time the numbers change. These little touches really helped Monsters U feel like an older period than Monsters Inc, even with all the more advanced animation and several secondary voice actors that were in it who were not as famous or active in 2000 as they were in 2012. When Mike Wazowski, a little green beach ball with one big eye and one big heart, enrolls in Monsters University, Randall is his friend and Sulley is his foe, but over time, they switch roles. Randall becomes Dafoe and Sulley becomes Dafriend. Randall was just a popularity seeker who wanted to goof off and party while Mike was studying. After Sulley was rejected by Roar Omega Roar because of his bad grades, Randall Boggs later got in to spite Mike Wazowski, and dumps buckets of brightly-colored paint and stuffed animals on Oozma Kappa to humiliate them. Mike and Sulley join Oozma Kappa so they can qualify for the scare games. At first, Mike wants Oozma Kappa to do exactly what he does while Sulley tells Mike he can train the other monsters and not him. But after the Oozma Kappas all use their talents to distract the librarian and divide her attention away from the OK flag, and the Oozma Kappas visit Monsters Inc to learn that there is not just one type of scarer. So it doesn't really make any sense why Abigail Hardscrabble and other monsters insist that Mike isn't scary. Even if Sulley didn't tamper with Mike's settings to make them easier, Mike scraping the bed and roaring as loud as he can would certainly scare that animatronic kid. It is a safe bet that it would give him half the score on hard mode of what he got after Sulley made it easy for him.
What else makes Monsters U feel even more like a true prequel to Monsters Inc is that it shares character dynamics and character developments from the first two Pixar movies before Monster Zinc. Like Woody and Buzz in Toy Story, Mike and Sulley are the leading duo who start out as arrogant enemies, but learn important things about each other and become friends over time. Like the troop of circus bugs in A Bug's Life, Art, Don, Scott, Terri and Terry, the Oozma Kappa fraternity of the "okay" monsters, are a band of underdogs and misfits whom the protagonist, Mike, whips into shape and helps to discover their true potential as warriors/scarers. Terry even has the same voice of Flik from that film! That was a very nice touch. One thing about this film that was very admirable, something that Billy Crystal has said many times to people interviewing him about Monsters U, is that Monsters U teaches us that you need to find a new plan if your dreams do not come true, or find an alternate route to your success if your first plan did not succeed. Mike and Sulley get expelled from the University for blowing up the Camp Teamwork door, but Hardscrabble still wishes them good luck and is proud of them for surprising them with such a powerful scare. Seamus showed me how disappointed I was that Henry Waternoose did not hire them on the spot for pulling off the biggest scare in the school's history just because they had no other option to get back to the monster world without being captured, attacked or arrested by human authorities. Scaring adults generates more power than scaring kids, enough power to turn on a blocked door from the other side and make the scream cans fly off the shelves, but no other monster would dare to do that because adults would be a lot more dangerous to monsters than children and it could expose the monster world behind the closets, when it is safer to just scare kids because older people they might tell about it would think that it is just their imagination or a nightmare than they had. Still, the greatest thing about Mike and Sulley working in the mailroom - and eventually working hard enough to qualify for scare tryouts - is that they threw Johnny Worthington's words back in his face after moving past the mailroom. The most valuable player of this film, who was not in Monsters Inc, has got to be Art. He is a cool guy with a funny voice and a wacky face who has an interesting, shady past. He knows his way through the sewers, he has "an extra toe", and he has been in jail before we met him. Art is quite the lovable rebel.