MONSTERS, INC. (2001)  ***

Reviewed 11/2/01

MONSTERS, INC. is animation studio Pixar’s fourth feature film.  It is the latest and by a slim margin, the least.

That childhood (and in some cases, adult) fear of the thing that goes bump in the night or of the creepy crawly that waits beneath the bed gets another take in MONSTERS, INC.  While effectively rendered in the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes” and in the movie POLTERGEIST as a primal dread of the unknown, it acquires a high-concept sheen here.  These monsters live in another dimension, in a city called Monstropolis.  Closets are the interdimensional doorways into our world, and the monsters utilize them to make children scream.  The screams are stored in yellow canisters and returned to the monster world where they work as an energy source powering lights, factories, and transportation.  The company, Monsters, Inc., run by Henry J. Waternoose (James Coburn), is the oil, coal, and natural gas business of the human world, employing monsters to scare children.  Much of the film’s comedy stems from the juxtaposition of monsters with the human work force in all of its banality.

The champion scarer, as they are called, is James P. Sullivan (John Goodman), nicknamed Sully for short.  Sully is a blue hairy sasquatch with purple spots and a pair of horns.  His partner who manages the technical and bureaucratic aspects of the job is the one-eyed, stout green pear named Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal).  Pixar makes Mike amazingly expressive considering he is basically an eye and a mouth.   Vying with Sully for employee of the month is Randall (Steve Buscemi), a cross between a salamander and  a chameleon with eight legs.  One evening, Sully volunteers to stay late and help Mike deliver his paperwork so Mike can get his date, Celia (Jennifer Tilly), to the ritzy sushi palace, Harryhausen’s (an homage to special effects monster creator Harry).  Sully instead stumbles on a mysterious plot by Randall that lets a little human girl, Boo (Mary Gibbs), into the monster world, an enormous taboo given the belief that humans are toxic to monsters.  Whenever an item from the human world inadvertently comes into the monster universe, a massive decontamination task force arrives on the scene using draconian measures for the cleanup.  Sully and Mike try to hide Boo to keep from getting fired while also figuring out how to return her to the right door and uncover Randall’s nefarious plot.

While Pixar’s films are generally overrated in comparison to other genre achievements, they are among the best animated movies, computer or otherwise, of the past decade.  MONSTERS, INC. does not quite live up to this reputation, but it is nevertheless an entertaining, if not terribly memorable, frolic.  The movie runs along at a frantic pace with a restlessness that hides the fact that the plot is essentially a tired and predictable one.  The film is not as comically surreal as it could be given its premise.   It feels overly explanatory.  Still, it has enormously creative moments, not the least of which includes an inspired BEING JOHN MALKOVICH-like climax.  Sully and Mike’s character designs were obviously given the most thought, and the others suffer in comparison except for Roz (Bob Peterson), a slug with grandma glasses