I’ll get right to the point; Monsters University is a good Pixar film. It’s not a near perfect film, like Toy Story 3, but it is definitely a step up from both Cars 2 and Brave (both of which were enjoyable, but not quite up to Pixar snuff).
The movie tells the tale of Monsters Inc. stars Mike Wazowski (voiced by Billy Crystal), and James P. Sullivan (John Goodman, in a role his voice was born to play), as they enter college and try to become the scarers that we all know and love from the first film. As is expected in a prequel, when Mike and Sulley first meet, they instantly despise each other, and later have to learn to work together to achieve a common goal (I don’t want to give too much away, for risk of spoiling anything). The film does a nice job introducing us to characters that we already know, but in a way that makes them seem almost like completely new characters (the best example of this is the villain from the 1st film, Randall Boggs, whom we meet in this film as a shy nerd, and we get to see grow into the character we know and love to hate.)
Monsters University thrives on its extensive cast of supporting players, ranging from wild man Art (voiced by Charlie Day) and the rest of the members of Oozma Kappa to Nathan Fillion’s stuck up jock Johnny (think of Stan Gable from Revenge of the Nerds). My personal favorite character was Don, a self described “mature student” who was recently downsized from his company, and has come back to school to “learn the computers”. Rounding out the cast is Dean Hardscrabble, voiced with frightening intensity by Helen Mirren, who acts as an adversary to our heroes.
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