Monsters University

What happened to Pixar?  It seems as if the company peaked with Up (and what a peak that is!).  Since then, the quality has dwindled to a point where the little resemblance to the films that built Pixar.  I remember a time when A Bug's Life was the bottom of the barrel for Pixar.  Now that looks like a masterpiece! (It kinda is a masterpiece.  It's Seven Samurai with bugs and a strong moral lesson.) 

The beginning of the end came with the extreme success of Cars.  I'm going to put this out there: Cars is awful.  It's one of the better looking films from Pixar, but the story and characters are terrible.  But it made a boatload of money and Disney got greedy.  Then came the sequel mania: Cars 2, Monsters University, Planes (not technically Pixar but a Cars cash grab), and the forthcoming Finding Nemo sequel.  Stuck in there was the lackluster Brave.  It seems as if Pixar lost their heart and soul.

The thing about Pixar movies though is that, even at their worst, they're still better than most of the kids fare coming out.  Monsters University is no exception.  I love, love, love Monsters Inc.  While Up and Wall-E are my favorites from Pixar, Monsters Inc. gets rewatched the most.  The characters are infinitely enjoyable and the moral is so impressively important while still being understandable to a child.  Monsters University takes the same moral from A Bug's Life and makes it heavy-handed and clichéd.  It also takes the lovable main characters and makes them selfish jerks. 

The plot is about Mike and Sully's first year in college.  Their egos get them kicked out of the "scare program."  Despite hating each other, they must recruit a rag-tag group of monsters to win the annual Scare Games.  If they can pull it off, they'll be reinstated in the "scare program."  If not, they'll be expelled from Monsters University!  Can our heroes overcome their differences and win the day?

It's a pretty dull movie.  The look is bland.  The characters are lame.  The plot is overdone.

The worst aspect is how the filmmakers treat the film as if Monsters Inc. never happened or, at the very least, you never saw it.  It's especially bad with the "toxic children" aspect.  We know from the first movie that kids aren't actually toxic, but this movie uses that to create tension.  Since the audience knows that contact with children will not hurt our heroes, we don't have any suspense in any of those scenes.  We also know that Mike and Sully become best friends, so we get to spend the entire movie wondering when they'll stop being so mean to each other and start being enjoyable characters.

If Monsters University will occupy your kids and give you 100 minutes of peace, then I say rent it.  But don't watch it yourself.  It's boring.  There's better things you could be doing while your kids are distracted.

5 out of 10