Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Monsters University Review


Imagine a family friendly version of Revenge of the Nerds, only with cute monsters instead of nerds and frat boys. Monsters University is the sequel to my favorite Pixar film of all time, Monsters Inc. While I preferred Pixar when their focus was on new and different films every time, I have to admit that I'm down for as many trips back to the Monsters universe as they're prepared to take. I saw the original Monsters Inc. way back in 2001, which predated my having children by three years. I fell in love with Sully and Mike in a way that I don't think Pixar intended for 23 year olds without kids of their own. Not only is the premise genius, a monster world where screams are their main power source, and they harvest it by going into children's bedrooms and scaring them? And this is their job? Absolutely brilliant.

Monsters University acts as a prequel, and we get to see Mike Wazowski and James P. "Sully" Sullivan as they were in college, before becoming Monsters Inc.'s premiere scare team. Turns out the two weren't always best of friends, but a series of unfortunate events leads to the two of them being forced to work together to get into the university's scare program, which is the pool where Monsters Inc. picks it's scarers from. Of course along the way the two of them manage not to set aside differences, but to use each other's strengths to overcome obstacle after obstacle. This is one of the most cliche, and non specific plot summaries you will ever read here, but the fact is that Monsters University is so good, to spoil anything would be doing you an injustice.


As you may have surmised on your own already, I totally loved this movie. Loved it. This time around, I got to see it with my kids, in fact I took them on my daughter's birthday, and it was just a perfect night. Shopping, dinner, and a great movie. Monsters U is funny, uplifting, heartwarming, and simply put one of the best times I've had in a theater in recent memory. See it, whether you have little monsters of you own or not.

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