Monsters University (U.)
Directed by Dan Scanlon. Featuring the voices of Billy Crystal, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Helen Mirren, Alfred Molina and Nathan Fillion. 110 mins.
Kids, eh? Ungrateful, spoilt brats who are never satisfied even though it seems that most of society is geared to sating their whims.Even a funny, warm and clever new animated feature from Pixar wasn’t enough to stop one overgrown chubby lad sulking in the back row whining about it not being up to the standards of Wall-e, Up and Toy Story 3.
Apart from the lack of ambition compared to the masterpieces they made at the end of the last decade, there’s really very little to pick fault with this prequel to Monsters Inc, but maybe not that much to get particularly excited about either. It tells the story of how Mike (Crystal) and Sulley (Goodman) first met up at University so it ends up as a child friendly Animal House. Like all children’s films it includes positive messages but they don’t come across as pat little homilies, the plot really illustrates the message.
Other than being out of ideas, a possible reasons for Pixar making a prequel eleven years on would be to provide a yardstick to show just how far they have the raised the bar for computer animation over the last decade. The original is going to look distinctly primitive compared to this though even Mons Uni wanes next to the quality of animation in the short film that precedes it, Blue Umbrella, which is eerily life-like.
Directed by Dan Scanlon. Featuring the voices of Billy Crystal, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Helen Mirren, Alfred Molina and Nathan Fillion. 110 mins.
Kids, eh? Ungrateful, spoilt brats who are never satisfied even though it seems that most of society is geared to sating their whims.Even a funny, warm and clever new animated feature from Pixar wasn’t enough to stop one overgrown chubby lad sulking in the back row whining about it not being up to the standards of Wall-e, Up and Toy Story 3.
Apart from the lack of ambition compared to the masterpieces they made at the end of the last decade, there’s really very little to pick fault with this prequel to Monsters Inc, but maybe not that much to get particularly excited about either. It tells the story of how Mike (Crystal) and Sulley (Goodman) first met up at University so it ends up as a child friendly Animal House. Like all children’s films it includes positive messages but they don’t come across as pat little homilies, the plot really illustrates the message.
Other than being out of ideas, a possible reasons for Pixar making a prequel eleven years on would be to provide a yardstick to show just how far they have the raised the bar for computer animation over the last decade. The original is going to look distinctly primitive compared to this though even Mons Uni wanes next to the quality of animation in the short film that precedes it, Blue Umbrella, which is eerily life-like.
