Let me explain why this is a great entry for Pixar...

Rating: 8/10 (23 November 2013)

I will start off with saying that most of this movie's greatness I caught on the second and third viewing of watching the movie:
Monsters University never really needed to exist, but I'm glad it did. Nobody really asked how Mike and Sulivan met, yet this movie explains it for us anyways. The first thing one will notice about this movie is that it is NOT focused on lots of action, conspiracies, gigantic complex roller-coaster scenes or most of the usual stuff that Pixar does. This movie operates like a live-action movie which is really impressive. Unlike most Pixar movies, this movie focuses ENTIRELY on character development. The reason why this movie is good is because it knows that it can't be plot oriented like the first movie with its setting, so is shifts all of the focus to character interaction.
The movie's story-telling is very good, even though it may seem straight-forward. Things may have similar set-ups, but they don't necessarily happen in an order that one would expect. There were many moments where I was thinking "Huh, that could've been really generic but they switched it up". Mike and Sully are punished even though they redeemed themselves which I thought was nice, Mike does except his fate, Sully is genuinely scared of his future and many other elements like this were nice touches to keep things from being too generic.
Again, the character development is incredibly strong here and I was surprised just how many themes the movie was able to fit into. The movie shows a wide perspective of a series of ideas: It is okay the accept yourself, but it is also okay to expect more of yourself. If you want to be cool you can be cool, but there is nothing wrong with not wanting that. Not everyone has a chance at reaching their goal, so don't hate yourself for not being able to accomplish that goal, but don't give up on greatness just because you can't make one dream. Punishment is punishment, just because a superior punishes you and you redeem yourself does not mean that you won't have to suffer the consequences. This is an incredibly complex movie as far as themes go and I feel like a lot could be analyzed from this film. Even better yet, all of the main characters do have some character flaws that get ironed out.
However, the main villains of the movie are fairly generic. There is nothing really unique about them and they say some very cliché things. I wish the villains could've been a little bit better, but they aren't too important to the plot so it isn't a huge nitpick.
The animation in this movie is phenomenal; however, I fee like some of this movie lacked creativity. The Monster world was too close to the human world in my opinion. Their buses looked like normal buses except with a couple spikes, their chairs looked the same, their college campus was virtually identical, their houses and tech operated the same as ours, and much of the environment looked like the animators just toured a college and animated over real objects. The characters themselves look great and when they do reach the human world is looks absolutely stunning, but I still feel like it lacked visual creativity. I saw about five monsters in this movie that were identical except for their color and there were about ten instances of this. A lot of reoccurring designs.
All in all, Monsters University was a pleasant surprise. It was much better than I expected and it has a lot more going on it than one might figure. It has much slower pacing and is character focused and is fairly original for a movie that doesn't have an entirely original concept. The only down-side for people might be the more straight-forward moments, the lame villains, and the fact that Randall was such a nice guy. Good movie and definitely worth seeing with an open mind.