ACASCREAMIA

The animated fantasy Monsters, Inc., from 2001, operated on the premise that blue-collar monsters cross over from their dimension and really do haunt the closets of children in ours. They don’t do it to be mean, but rather to collect the energy of the kiddies’ screams for use as a power source.

Like most Disney-Pixar flicks, it was funny and imaginative, but I like the new prequel, Monsters University, even better. As the title suggests, it’s a campus comedy, in which we see the initial meeting between studious freshman Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) and lackadaisical BMOC James Sullivan (John Goodman). Their rivalry causes them both to run afoul of the haughty centipede-like Dean (Helen Mirren), and their only chance to stay at MU is pure Harold Lloyd: They must lead the misfit team from the school’s lowliest frat to triumph in the school’s “Scare Games.”

Ingenious set-pieces ensue, but amusing and well-paced as the film is, it’s also, in its lighthearted way, a real exploration of a painful, rarely-treated issue—what happens when our talents simply don’t line up with what we most want to do with our lives? Mike, you see, is determined to become a “scarer,” actually entering kids’ rooms and frightening them. The trouble is that the poor creature—a cyclopean green sphere with spindly limbs—just isn’t scary.

This theme was treated sentimentally in the 1993 football movie Rudy, but it gets a more frank and nuanced dramatization here. And the non-pandering resolution of some of the story points is really surprising—the characters don’t get everything they want, and even finishing college isn’t seen as a must.