Monsters University

I went to see Monsters University last night. It's a prequel to Monsters, Inc., giving us the story of the main characters in college. It was very good. Good enough to write a blog post after a months-long hiatus! Spoiler alert: I'm going to write about things that happen throughout the movie.

So the premise is that the little green monster, Mike Wazowski, is not very scary, and the big blue monster, James Sullivan, is. I love that they have "normal" names, and I think that's funnier than naming them Scary McFangs or something.

The whole movie is basically about Mike trying to be scary, studying hard for his Scaring class and final and then trying to win the Scare Games, while Sulley is a natural but that makes him pretty full of himself. The reason I'm still thinking about it and writing about it is that in the end, Mike does not become scary. His hard work pays off, but not in the form he hoped for. This is a really powerful idea for the kids and adults who watch the movie. Similarly, they were both cut from the Scaring program and eventually expelled, and the movie does not have a deus ex machina that lets them back into school to graduate with honors. They both leave school after one year to work in the mailroom at Monsters, Inc., which of course leads directly to the other movie. Again, not what either of them hoped for or expected from their college experience or from life, but it definitely counts as a happy ending. Happy and realistic. I'm continually impressed by Pixar/Disney's ability to draw adults in and write very fine scripts, both on the story-arc level and on the line level, while catering just as powerfully to children. In this case, as in others, it's a story most of us need to hear: no, we can't always transform ourselves or get what we want. But that doesn't mean failure, and if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.