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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The new animated feature from Pixar has too much Disney pap and not enough Gothic.
Nov 2, 2001 | My wife and her four sisters all have a habit of leaving closet doors open and dresser drawers halfway out. If you're married to one of them, it can make a nighttime trip to the bathroom in a dark house a veritable obstacle course. So in the first years of my marriage, I got my wife to shut the bedroom closet at night by asking her the thing all kids know: What happens if you leave the closet open? Why, the monsters come out, of course.
The monsters keep coming out of closets in Disney's new Pixar feature, the computer-animated "Monsters, Inc." They're the denizens of a city named Monstropolis, reached via the bedroom closets of small children. The city relies on the energy generated by children's screams to power it, and Monsters, Inc. is the company that sends its most terrifying personnel to spring out of those nighttime closets to terrify kids.
This premise bears some resemblance to Henry Selick's "Monkeybone," where nightmares power a netherworld, and also to the French film "The City of Lost Children," in which a mad scientist attempts to steal children's dreams. And Selick or Tim Burton could have done something great with it. Disney, though, doesn't have much taste for the gothic, and "Monsters, Inc." is rendered in the same cheery and bright mood of the two "Toy Story" pictures and "A Bug's Life."
Like those movies, especially the latter, it's agreeable and often funny, and adults who take their kids to see it might be surprised to find themselves having a pretty good time. It maintains a fairly brisk pace (though 90 minutes is a hell of a long time for any cartoon to sustain itself). It's the thought of what it might have been in different hands that keeps it from being more enjoyable.
"Monsters, Inc."
Directed by Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and David Silverman
With the voices of John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Mary Gibbs, Steve Buscemi, James Coburn, Jennifer Tilly
The monsters here are scared of only one thing: little kids. Let some hapless monster come back with so much a discarded sock and it's enough to send the decontamination squad into high alert. The plot is kicked into gear when Monsters, Inc.'s top scarer, a big, green galoot named Sulley (voiced by John Goodman), accidentally brings a little kid back with him from a nighttime visitation.
Boo (Mary Gibbs), as he comes to call her, has the big eyes of a Walter Keane painting and the oversized noggin of a Bobbin' Head doll. Sulley is too cuddly to be frightening to her and she happily runs riot over the place Sulley shares with his buddy and coworker Mike (Billy Crystal). Meanwhile, her assigned monster, Sulley's nemesis, the slimy Randall Boggs (Steve Buscemi), terrifies Boo and spends his time trying to track her down.
There's potentially a great comic idea in this: the monstrousness of kids, who are able to suck the energy from any adult in a mile radius and still be adorable while they do it. Next to Boo, Sulley and Mike (who's like a friendly green version of the invaders from the old B-movie "The Eye Creatures") are every harried parent you've ever seen.
