| HugeReviews.com
Reviews:
Picking up where old Disney left
off: Monsters, Inc.
by Christian De Matteo
Super
I'd been looking forward to Monsters, Inc because
Pixar
has thus far proved highly reliable in creating fun and
entertaining faire for both children and adults.
With the exception of A Bug's Life, which I
enjoyed very much but questioned the suitability for the
smaller audience members who might find it too intense, Pixar
has been charged with making the quality entertainment
that Disney (the main division) used to make before they
got too big for their britches. With Beauty and
the Beast, Disney entered the business of dazzling
adults with animated Broadway and spiraled further and further
away from their youngest (and core) audience.
Instead of
placing adult jokes here and there for fun's sake, they
riddle their films with adult humor well above the
heads of children.
With Monsters, Inc. we see a film that takes an
ancient childhood theme of the Boogeyman- the monster in
the closet and the one under the bed--and takes a
hysterical turn on it, presenting it as an alternate world
business necessary for a society's survival. Sure
this is funny to Mom and Dad, slaving away under the
whip of Corporate America every day, but its also funny
for the kids to see a monster as a workaday person like
their parents. Like the Toy Story movies
with their "laser envy" jokes, Monsters,
Inc. has its occasional laugh for the older folks,
but not to the extent where the children are excluded
and miss portions of the movie as a result. (Do,
however, watch out for a snow cone joke that would make
Frank Zappa beam with pride, even though he's
dead.) Most importantly, the kids jokes which make
up the majority of the movie work darn well for the
adults, a truly rare feat as many a parent forced to
watch the Barney movie will tell you.
Additionally, the film has a great message about lateral
thinking, about not assuming there's only one way to do
things and looking at every option and experimenting
with new and different ways. The beauty of this
message is that it's the most subtle message I've seen
in a long, long time; so subtle I only realized it's presence
in reflecting on the film later. I find subtlety to work
much better than blatancy, and Monsters, Inc.
does just this.
Monsters,
Inc., while very funny, is not about
outright hysterics. The movie is very touching and
very cute, aimed more at telling a wonderful little
fairytale than an outrageous adventure. The little
girl character Boo (voiced by little Mary Gibbs) may
very well have you next to tears with her cuteness, the
first character in some time in any sort of movie that I
have wanted to snatch off the screen and hug for days on
end.
Voiced wonderfully by Billy Crystal (The
Princess Bride), John Goodman (The
Big Lebowski), and James Coburn (Payback),
along with a good number of other fine actors, the movie
moves along at a steady, never dragging clip, with
excellently timed quips between characters and great
chemistry. My only disappointment was that Steve
Buscemi, a favorite actor of mine, didn't seem to have
the right amount of menace for his villain character,
his Randall Boggs coming across as tad bit flat. I
was surprised because his animation voice work is usually
quite good, in fact one of the few good things about Final
Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
A
wonderful movie to see with you kids, with your
girlfriend or with your husband of thirty years, Monsters,
Inc. is a very fun, exciting and rewarding film, and
one I highly recommend.
|
