Monster laughs and nothing but praise for this Disney-Pixar effort.

Rating: 7/10 (30 April 2019)

Without giving the name of the author, Canadian social commentator Mark Steyn cited a piece of writing during a 2012 interview with an American cable-TV company which was about how children perceive the world around them through the fiction they're exposed to early on in life. Principally, he cites an analysis made by a fellow-Canadian on how creatures, or 'monsters', on television, or in cutesy books, were damaging to kids - it imparted the idea that monsters were just cute, cuddly friends that needed taming or befriending. Steyn seemed to prefer 'classic' children's literature in this respect, because there you garner a '...far greater sense of the realities of life from the Brothers Grimm than you will from the Cookie Monster.'
I wonder what either of them thought of "Monsters Inc.", where the one infant character in the film is completely unafraid of precisely the sorts of post-Sesame Street monsters the article cited, yet is a character in a piece imparting the idea that cute and cuddly is good. To some extent, Disney's 2002 animation plays like a kind of animated therapy for young children, who will of course love the colour; vibrancy and sense of adventure infused throughout "Monster's Inc.", but will also have one of their fears exorcised - that of the dark bedroom at night-time and the idea a creature might lurk beyond a visible realm.
At the core of the film is a quite brilliant idea: in an alternate world running parallel to our own, there exist actual creatures, hideous in physicality, desperately in need of the terrified screams of young children so as to run their civilisation. In order to do so, they appear in bedroom closets around the world late at night (the only gateway from our own universe to theirs); do what they have to do to induce sheer panic and return home again having captured the noise in a canister. One of the film's best jokes, in fact, doubles up as a devilish social commentary on how much harder it is these days to truly frighten children, given what they are often exposed to on TV and in video games.
The scream-drive is propelled by two monsters called Sully and Randall, whose physical characteristics are cleverly echoed by their voice-talents: Sully, like John Goodman, is big and huggable and has a dopey voice, whilst Steve Buscemi's lizard-like creation is more slender and bug-eyed. Sully is the consummate professional who goes through the same process every morning: exercising and scare routines with his flat-mate and floor-work partner Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal). He blindly trusts the corporation, epitomised quite cleverly in the arachnid-like CEO Henry J. Waternoose (James Coburn), who sports a waist-coat but is tragically missing a monocle. Children are Sully's worst enemy, believing them to be potentially toxic. Regardless, he puts his life on the line every day for his society - the moral justification for all this lies in the company's motto: 'We scare, because we care'.
As each of the monsters in the company lumbered with this responsibility walk to their posts in slow motion, the film invokes Michael Bay's 1998 film "Armageddon", which infers a sense of doom or catastrophe if these brave souls were to fail in their duty: these people are the guardians of civilisation. Civilisation does not quite crumble, but disaster strikes when a young American child manages to make its way out of our world and into the monsters' own - enough to have Sully and Mike worried their days are numbered as previous misnomers have led to other monsters banished to our world, cleverly accounting for Bigfoot and the Yeti. In a panic, the twosome concoct a plan to return it to where it belongs, but that becomes problematic when Sully becomes attached to it.
"Monsters Inc." cracks along at a fantastic pace and works so wonderfully well because of a number of things. Principally, the stakes are incredibly high, so there is always this rapid, even nervous, energy pulsating through the film once the 20 minute mark elapses, and the film does such a wonderful job in bringing the two personalities in the form of its heroes to life in such a short space of time that we are hooked on their adventure the whole way. Furthermore, the characterisation is superb - these are rounded characters with lives; dreams; goals and even girlfriends - they possess different attitudes; physical appearances and characteristics. The world it creates, that of one parallel to our own, is extraordinary from a design perspective - the way they echo one another in the form of a daily commute; workplace rivalry; a relaxing meal after work and generally the things you see out and about is marvellous.
What directors Pete Docter; David Silverman and Lee Unkrich later pull off is the incredibly tricky transition the film needs to make from being a double-act comedy about getting rid of something which doesn't want to leave, to being a film about foiling a corporate conspiracy. One cannot laud the team enough. Laudable too is the character study - this is Sully's film; a character who blindly trusts the machine at the beginning of the film but undergoes his own journey to find out that kids are not toxic; corruption might come from anywhere and even tackles the moral dilemma of how to power his world. Irrespective of age, and with whomever you see it, "Monster's Inc." is a genuinely infectious and wholesome piece of animated entertainment.