November 2, 2001
Monsters of Childhood With Feelings and Agendas
By ELVIS MITCHELL
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| (Disney/Pixar) |
| Mike, left, needs just one contact lens, but it's a whopper. He helps Sully scare kids because their screams power a parallel universe. |
Freaks, mutants and misshapen creatures shambling off to work — no, it's not a documentary about rush hour on the New York subway system. This is the premise of Pixar's newest brightly colored, computer- animated feature, "Monsters, Inc."
Pixar Animation Studios has now so streamlined the process that you may find yourself eagerly awaiting the release of "Monsters" on video so you can take in all the myriad visual jokes planted all over the frame, a form of visual invention that adds an extra tickle to the picture. Not that "Monsters" needs it; in a final reversal of events, Pixar has given Disney, which financed the film, the last leg up by stealing the style and speed of Warner Brothers cartoons, which used to ridicule Disney's do-gooder ethos.
The breakneck wit of "Monsters, Inc." covers a lot of ground and makes fun of everything from the paranoid thrillers of the 1970's (this could be "The Parallax View" for kids) to the self-mythologizing needs of the mass media as well as the cartoon form. The opening credits evoke the clean lines and bop dizziness of UPA, the studio responsible for "Gerald McBoing-Boing" in the 1950's. No big deal is made of this, though; the joke is dropped and "Monsters" streaks along.
Monsters, Inc. is a company that sends kids screaming into their parents' bedrooms; it employs the creatures that ominously lurk inside closets and give children the frights. Closets are the entry into the regular world from the creatures' own home universe. The impetus to create fear comes out of self-interest; in Monstropolis, the freakazoid parallel dimension in which the monsters live, children's screams are used as a power source. But that power is drying up because kids don't scare so easily anymore.
One Monsters, Inc. employee still exceeds his mandated scare quota: Sullivan (the voice of John Goodman), a furry blue-and-purple giant whose design specs may have come from a 70's dorm room. His best pal is his one-man crew, Mike (Billy Crystal), a bouncy, bile-green little guy who would have a chip on his shoulder if he had shoulders; the ovoid Mike is one big eye with a really big mouth, arms and legs. (You'll choke on laughter as he tries to slip in his single, hubcap-size contact lens.)
Sullivan is the champ, and his boss and mentor, Mr. Waternoose (James Coburn), sums up Sully's technique for a group of auditioning monsters. "It's all about presence, about how you enter the room," Waternoose pontificates, and this authoritative twaddle spoofs the kind of thing heard on "Inside the Actors Studio."
Like any classic cartoon character, Mike is a textbook case of manic depression. He zooms from high to lows to tantrums faster than any 3-year-old, even Boo (Mary Gibbs), the 3-year-old human who puts all of Monstropolis, and specifically Sully and Mike, in danger.
Any artifact from the human world is a contaminant; when one hapless monster returns from a scare jaunt with an innocent-looking sock caught on his fur, he's attacked by a decontamination team, a group that subjects him to a special group of terrors to keep Monstropolis sterile. (This may be an unfortunate time to joke about a threat of contamination, but the rubber-suited mop-up squad — latex tight over their odd shapes — is a great sight gag.) When Boo enters Monstropolis, panic erupts and it's up to Sully and Mike to return her without being blamed for the mishap.
"Loch Ness, Big Foot, they all have one thing in common — banishment," Mike sputters, mentioning the ultimate punishment. And they have to stay out of the way of their vile competitor, Randall (Steve Buscemi), who lives to overtake Sully's fabulous stats.
This all leads to a chase that features slamming closet doors leading to many locations; maybe it's why Boo's decal-spattered door looks like a portal from "Laugh-In," because the doors all lead to other jokes. And the alternative-energy conclusion itself could make another movie. For a movie about an energy crisis, there hasn't been a film in years to use creative energy as efficiently as "Monsters, Inc."; this is one clean-burning engine that doesn't waste a joke or a thought. The hot hues of the picture's color scheme are thought through; the shininess makes the film look as if it's set in an overly bright factory.
Portions of the movie bring to mind the 1989 film "Little Monsters," in which a little boy found a netherworld of creatures under his bed, though here (as in some parts of "Little Monsters"), many of the inhabitants may have been inspired by the bug-eyed doodles of Ed (Big Daddy) Roth, whose CARtoons magazine regulars could all be like Mike. (Otherworldly denizens piling into bedrooms through a closet are a salute to Terry Gilliam's "Time Bandits"; all the worlds constructed by Pixar are a perpetual tribute to Mr. Gilliam's gleeful eye-candy assaults.)
"Monsters" gets a little sticky in the end, which is apparently axiomatic, since feature-length cartoons are required to celebrate childhood in a rather square way. "Monsters" takes some mild shots at the jaded little members of its target audience, but it doesn't really want to upset them or their parents.
Pixar has created a genre that others merely imitate, and while they may do a creditable job — "Shrek" from DreamWorks, for example — they don't get all the small touches right, like the thunderous and jazzy score of "Monsters." The composer Randy Newman shows touches of Carl Stalling, whose brass construction kept Bugs Bunny and his clique moving.
"Monsters" may also be compared a little unfavorably with the director John Lasseter's Pixar work, including the "Toy Story" movies and "A Bug's Life." It took Mr. Lasseter a while to achieve something like the ending of "Toy Story 2," when Buzz the astronaut and Woody the cowboy talk like a couple of heroes from a John Ford western closing out a film; there was a surprising iconic majesty, with earned emotional attachment because of what they endured.
The "Monsters, Inc." director, Peter Docter, makes his own inroads. He knows how funny it is to get the matching basso rumbles from Mr. Goodman and Mr. Coburn as a de facto father-and-son pair. He knows that older viewers — and "Monsters, Inc." will have more than its share — will enjoy Mr. Crystal's recycling of the put-upon Jersey screech of one of his old "Saturday Night Live" characters, the sour-faced masochist Willie, who talked about how much he hated getting a potato peeler stuck up his nose.
Mr. Docter; his story co-creators, Jill Cultan, Jeff Pidgeon and Ralph Eggleston; and the screenplay writers, Andrew Stanton and Daniel Gerson, get in a few digs at "Toy Story" and turn the fake-looking humans of computer animation into a canny joke early on. And they must be amused about persuading Disney to finance a comedy that is, finally, about anticorporate behavior. (A good inside bit: for years Mr. Buscemi has joked that he's never made a movie he could see with his family.)
What makes "Monsters, Inc." so wonderful is that it's about scream deficit, yet all great cartoons are powered by screams. It's a tribute to noise, so how can you not fall in love with it?
MONSTERS, INC.
Directed by Pete Docter, with Lee Unkrich and David Silverman; written by Andrew Stanton and Daniel Gerson, based on a story by Mr. Docter, Jill Culton, Jeff Pidgeon and Ralph Eggleston; supervising technical director, Thomas Porter; edited by Jim Stewart; music by Randy Newman; production designers, Harley Jessup and Bob Pauley; produced by Darla K. Anderson; released by Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios. Running time: 88 minutes. This film is rated G.
WITH THE VOICES OF: John Goodman (James P. Sullivan), Billy Crystal (Mike Wazowski), Mary Gibbs (Boo), Steve Buscemi (Randall Boggs), James Coburn (Henry J. Waternoose), Jennifer Tilly (Celia), Bob Peterson (Roz), John Ratzenberger (Yeti) and Frank Oz (Fungus).
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
