Features

Primary navigation

• The Ultimate Film Chart
• By decade
• Alphabetically
• Complete list

The town of Monstropolis is powered by the screams of human children. These screams are collected by the elite scarers of Monsters, Incorporated, who enter children's rooms at night via their closet doors. The town is facing an energy crisis because of the increasing difficulty of scaring modern children. The top scarer at Monsters, Inc. is James P. 'Sulley' Sullivan, who lives with his best friend and scare assistant Mike Wazowski. One night, returning to the factory for some paperwork, Sulley inadvertently allows a human girl to enter Monstropolis, where children are forbidden. Discovering that, contrary to popular belief, children are not toxic, Sulley forms a bond with the girl, whom he names Boo.

Attempting to find Boo's closet door and return her home, Sulley and Mike discover that rival scarer Randall Boggs has created a machine that forcibly extracts screams from children. It emerges that Randall is being sponsored by the company's CEO, Henry J. Waternoose, who banishes Sulley and Mike to the Himalayas. Returning to the factory, the duo rescue Boo from Randall and expose Waternoose. Waternoose is arrested by the Child Detection Agency, whose director, Roz, has been working undercover at Monsters, Inc. Roz orders Boo's door to be shredded after the girl returns home. The energy crisis is resolved by the discovery that children's laughter produces more power. Mike rebuilds Boo's door. Sulley enters and is greeted by Boo.

Monsters, Inc. is the fourth wholly computer-generated animated feature from production outlet Pixar (here, as usual, backed by Disney), and as such represents the studio's most sophisticated use of CGI technology. Two and half million rendermarks (a measure of computing power) were required, the press notes excitedly report, to produce the movie (this compares with 1.1 million for Toy Story 2). One significant breakthrough is the convincing depiction of hair/fur, primarily that of eight-foot monster protagonist Sulley. In perhaps the movie's most impressive shot, the huge number of individual hairs of Sulley's blue and purple coat are subjected to the twin rigours of wind and snow. But what is most impressive about the effect is how discreet it is. Our concern remains centred on the character's determination to return to Monstropolis, the film's fantastical setting, and see Boo, the human child he befriends, safely home. Ultimately, it is the film's careful attention to narrative and characterisation that pulls us in, not the beautifully rendered visuals.

In contrast to the bawdy iconoclasm of Story (produced by Disney/Pixar's big rivals DreamWorks/PDI), Monsters, Inc. (which takes its name from a company of creatures whose job is to scare human children) favours a more gentle approach to subversion. One of the best gags in the movie is the idea that monsters are as fearful of "toxic" human children (whose captured screams are converted into energy) as the kids are of them. The opening sequence unfolds like that of a conventional monster movie, with a large, ominous shadow falling across a bed and its sleeping inhabitant, and a pair of demonic eyes piercing the dark. But then we're plunged into comedy with the revelation that we're watching a training simulation whose participant is a novice scarer too jittery to remember the golden rule of closing the closet door.

What slightly undercuts the conceit is that the movie's pastel-coloured menagerie is so uniformly cuddly, lacking any of the repugnance of Shrek's eponymous ogre. Endowed with John Goodman's emollient vocal delivery, the ursine Sulley wouldn't look out of place on Sesame Street, while his sidekick Mike (voiced by a wisecracking Billy Crystal), a limbed pea-green sphere dominated by a giant single eye (which yields a terrific sight gag - a salad-bowl-sized contact lens) is too pitiably squat to be intimidating. Even the story's villain, Steve Buscemi's lizard-like Boggs, looks like a pliable plastic toy kids could have hours of fun mangling (no doubt a boon to the merchandisers).

The first Pixar feature not to be directed by John Lasseter, Monsters, Inc. departs from its forerunners in taking a fantasy locale for its central setting (the microcosms depicted in the Toy Story films and A Bug's life-were based in recognisable earthly environments). The alternative universe it portrays has an insulated quality that gives the movie much of its escapist charm. There are, however, several external resonances. The need for a new energy source as Monstropolis' traditional resources dwindle ties in neatly with the crisis of complacency that drives the plot the notion that "kids don't get scared like they used to" (the film slyly avoids suggesting that the entertainment industry might have played a role in desensitising children). But the most potent topical echo in Monsters, Inc. is one the film-makers could not have anticipated: a scene where rubber-suited emergency workers decontaminate a monster who's had contact with toxic (i.e. human) material. An unwitting evocation of the anthrax scares that dominated the news at the time of the film's US release, this scene, in such an otherwise transporting film, must have seemed uncomfortably close to home for American audiences.

Helper links

• Contact us
• Help
• Terms of use
• Privacy
• Linking
• Site map
• Accessibility/standards