Pixar Month - Monsters, Inc. (2001)

        Hey guys, Chuck here. Today, for Pixar Month, we head back to the early 2000's, at a time when Pixar films were more dominant at the box office than the hand-drawn animated films from Walt Disney Feature Animation (before it became Walt Disney Animation Studios), and take a look at Pixar's fourth feature: Monster's, Inc. 

         Set in a world filled with monsters of all shapes and sizes, Monsters, Inc. focuses on roommates and best friends James P. Sullivan, or Sulley for short, and Mike Wazowski, who work together on a scare floor at Monsters, Inc, a company where monsters enter the human world and scare human children, as the screams of children are harnessed as a source of energy. Sulley's main rival is a chameleon-like monster named Randall, who wants to take the top spot from Sulley. After a hard day's work, including two incidents of a "dead door," where a door has to be shredded due to the child no longer being scared, and a "23-19," where the CDA (Child Detection Agency) arrives to destroy an item from the human world attached to a monster, and clean them of "human contamination," Sulley is about to take care of Mike's paperwork, while Mike himself is about to go out to dinner with his girlfriend, Monsters, Inc. receptionist Celia. It is here that Sulley notices a door on the scare floor. It is here that a human child, a little girl named Boo, finds her way into the monster world, and her presence sends the entire city of Monstropolis into a high alert security zone. 

       The next day, Mike and Sulley work together to get Boo back home through her door, all while trying to avoid getting caught by the CDA, Monsters, Inc. CEO Henry J. Waternoose, and Randall. What follows is a series of misadventures that uncover a conspiracy by Randall and Waternoose to abduct human children and take their screams by force using a highly dangerous machine of Randall's invention, the "scream extractor." Mike and Sulley are temporarily banished to the human world, where they meet the Abominable Snowman, and find their way home through a small village in Nepal, and then banish Randall into a trailer in the southeastern U.S. Monsters, Inc file clerk Roz is revealed to be the undercover leader of the CDA, Waternoose is arrested for his involvement, Boo is sent home, and here door is shredded. 

       Some time later, Mike and Sulley are now running the day-to-day operations at Monsters, Inc, where they now collect children's laughter, as they learned from Boo that laughter is ten times more powerful than screams. Mike reveals to Sulley that he put Boo's door back together, and Sulley goes through and sees Boo one more time, ending the movie. 

          Monsters, Inc. is a very fun entry in Pixar's library of films, and the idea that monsters scaring children isn't for malicious reasons, but rather because it's their job, is pretty clever. The voice cast is great, with the likes of Billy Crystal, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Jennifer Tilly, and the late James Coburn leading the cast. The art design, with such unique monster designs, is really neat. The fur effects used to animate Sulley I found most impressive. Mike and Sulley's back-and-forth banter definitely felt like a series of modern Abbott and Costello routines. Overall a very funny movie, I give Monsters, Inc a rating of 4.75/5. Join me next time as Pixar Month takes us under the sea with Finding Nemo.