cute, amazing, very good

Rating: 9/10 (25 November 2001)

It's amazing how far CGI acting has come. I've accused some movies of having gone too far with the use of Computer Generated Images (CGI) and leaning on it a bit too much but in this case, the movie was all CGI and so it should be. Monsters, Inc. is basically a good old-fashioned cartoon, just tens times better than anything we used to watch as kids. And the interesting thing is that cartoons are no longer for children. More and more of these animated movies are appealing to the adults as much as they are to the children.
Monsters, Inc. is about something that every child knows aboutmonsters in their closet. We've all had our own monsters that we were terrified of as a child and they always seem to come from that spooky closet in our room. How did these monsters get here? What are they doing here? Monsters, Inc. takes us into the world of bedroom monsters. Every closet in every child's room in the world is connected to the monster world. While the children don't really get anything out of having the daylights scared out of them, the monster's world is powered by the screams they generate out of children. Everyday, some monsters' jobs are to go and generate power by going around to the human children of the world and scaring thembut the one thing that is absolutely not permitted is for a child to enter the world of monsters
Why was this movie so good? Lots of things. They have fantastic actors as voices for the characters. John Goodman plays the main character of Sulley (big blue furry monster) with Billy Crystal playing Sulley's buddy and sidekick, Mike Wazowski (one-eyed gumball looking fellow). With actors like these two fellows, it's hard not to have good material to work with and I wouldn't be surprised if Billy Crystal adlibbed some of his lines.

What also added to the quality of this movie was the ability to capture the emotions and expressions of these characters. Unlike animation of the past, computers have been able to mimic human emotions and expressions with great accuracy. This has allowed for the audience to feel closer and relate to these fantasy actors and create an overall more enjoyable experience.
Sometimes technology gets in the way of storytelling. It's happened in lots of movies where Hollywood thought that it could rest on the crutches of technology in place of a good storyline. Monsters, Inc. doesn't have this problem. On a basic level, the story is simple. The monster world is turned upside down when a little human child accidentally enters their world. But what the movie has been able to achieve beyond that is create a story that has good believable characters, even if they are fictional. The characters carry the emotions of what they face across the screen to the audience and the more the audience believes them, the better the story is. It's also nice to see that the humor is not just targeted at young children. I quite often heard adults laughing louder than the children and that's a good sign that the movie is appealing to everyone. I don't have any children but the friends that I went with all enjoyed this movie.
Overall, this was a very good movie. The animation was amazing, the voice actors were excellent and the story was entertaining. Go see it.