Stuck the Landing, Which Redeems is Slightly

Rating: 7/10 (2 July 2013)

Oh, Pixar, where have you gone? The best of Pixar films represent some of the best children's and family films of the last twenty years, films that will be cherished for generations to come, and will join or replace the classic Disney pantheon of Snow White, Bambi and others as the standard for family fare in the future. At it's best Pixar was creative, innovative, found a unique way to tell a clever story, and always managed to infuse the movies with characters with great heart and a story that causes them to learn much about themselves along the way.
Monsters University, while enjoyable enough, fails to find these attributes of Pixar's modern classics. Instead, Pixar has here produced a familiar story with familiar characters that fails to do anything original which really captures the imagination.
Here, we meet Mike and Sully much as we would have imagined them in their youth - Mike as a nerd and Sully as a popular party animal. Since there would be no story if Mike and Sully were instant friends, they begin the movie as rivals and then embark on a plot line straight out of Animal House or Revenge of the Nerds, trying to stave off expulsion from the menacing Dean while hopefully leading a group of underdogs to victory in a university competition.
Through this first three-quarters of the film, all we get is this generic story. Of course, the visuals are wonderful - the Monster world explodes with color and variety. Of course there are laughs (but fewer and less potent than in most Pixar comedies). But the only lasting characters are Mike and Sully - the ones we already knew. The other students at the University make little impression, and will not make any lists of favorite Pixar characters. Only the college dean (a very creepy combination of a dragon and a centipede) in memorable, and here more for her appearance than her character or voice work.
Fortunately, Pixar still knows how to stick the landings. Despite being presented with two or three opportunities to end the film in shallow and conventional ways, they keep going, keep probing Mike's quest to be a scarer, the reality that he will ultimately become a sidekick to Sully in the future, and the ways in which he and Sully need each other to be successful, and how their partnership is essential to their enduring friendship. Relationships - whether good, bad, strained, temporary, or lasting - is what Pixar does best, and in the last act here, they develop the relationship that we knew from Monsters Inc. must inevitably result.
The kids will enjoy it. There are some laughs. The last 20 minutes after the "Scaring Games" end spared this movie from a harsher review. But instead of Pixar genius, this is Pixar mediocrity, ultimately making a movie not much better than any number of family films out there.