Psycho's Movie Reviews #262: Monsters Inc. (2001)

Monsters, Inc. (Monsters, Incorporated) is a 2001 American computer-animated monster comedy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. Featuring the voices of John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Steve Buscemi, James Coburn, Mary Gibbs and Jennifer Tilly, the film was directed by Pete Docter in his directorial debut, and executive produced by John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton. The film centres on two monsters James P. "Sulley" Sullivan and his one-eyed partner and best friend Mike Wazowski who are employed at the titular energy-producing factory Monsters, Inc., which generates power by scaring human children. However, the monster world believes that the children are toxic, and when a little human girl sneaks into the factory, she must be returned home before it's too late.

Docter began developing the film in 1996, and wrote the story with Jill Culton, Jeff Pidgeon and Ralph Eggleston. Stanton wrote the screenplay with screenwriter Daniel Gerson. The characters went through many incarnations over the film's five-year production process. The technical team and animators found new ways to simulate fur and cloth realistically for the film. Randy Newman, who composed the music for Pixar's three prior films, returned to compose for its fourth.

Upon its release on November 2, 2001, Monsters, Inc. received critical acclaim and was a commercial success, grossing over $577 million worldwide to become the third highest-grossing film of 2001. The film won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for "If I Didn't Have You" and was nominated for the first Best Animated Feature, but lost to DreamWorks' Shrek, and was also nominated for Best Original Score and Best Sound Editing. Monsters, Inc. saw a 3D re-release in theatres on December 19, 2012. A prequel titled Monsters University, which was directed by Dan Scanlon, was released on June 21, 2013. A television series titled Monsters at Work premiered on Disney+ on July 7, 2021.

Plot

In a world inhabited by monsters, the city of Monstropolis harnesses the screams of human children for energy. At the Monsters, Incorporated factory, skilled monsters employed as "scarers" venture into the human world to scare children and harvest their screams, through doors that activate portals to children's bedroom closets. The field is considered dangerous, as human children are believed to be toxic. Energy production is falling because children are becoming less easily scared, and the company's CEO, Henry J. Waternoose III, is determined to keep the company from failing.

One evening after work, scarer James P. "Sulley" Sullivan discovers that an active door has been left in the station of his rival, Randall Boggs. He inspects the door and accidentally lets a small toddler girl into the factory. A frightened Sulley unsuccessfully attempts to return the girl, who escapes into Monstropolis, interrupting Sulley's best friend and assistant Mike Wazowski on a date at a sushi restaurant. Chaos erupts when other monsters see the girl, Sulley and Mike manage to escape with her before the Child Detection Agency (CDA) arrives and quarantines the restaurant. Forced to keep the girl hidden in their apartment for the night, Sulley soon realizes that the girl is not toxic and her laughter is able to cause a power surge more powerful than screams.

The next day, they sneak the girl back into the factory disguised as a monster and attempt to send her home. While Mike seeks out her door, Sulley grows attached to her and nicknames her "Boo". Randall, waiting in ambush for her, kidnaps Mike by accident and reveals his plan to revolutionize scaring: to kidnap children and extract screams from them, using a large vacuum-like machine of his invention called The Scream Extractor. Sulley rescues Mike and they go to tell Waternoose about Randall's plan, finding the boss in the middle of a scare demonstration, where he encourages Sulley to perform his roar in the company's simulator room. Sulley unknowingly scares Boo and realizes that scaring children to power the Monster world is wrong. Boo inadvertently reveals herself in front of Waternoose, who is in league with Randall, and Waternoose exiles Mike and Sulley to the Himalayas while keeping Boo with him.

The pair are taken in by a yeti, another exiled monster, who tells them about a nearby village, which Sulley realizes he can use to return to the monster world, but Mike refuses to go with him, blaming Sulley for their situation. Sulley returns to the factory and saves Boo from the Scream Extractor, but Randall fails to kill Sulley. Mike returns to reconcile with Sulley, inadvertently saving him from Randall, and they go to return Boo home. Randall pursues them into the door vault, where Boo's laughter activates all the doors at once, allowing them to freely pass in and out of the human world as they attempt to escape. Randall eventually catches up to them and attempts to kill Sulley, but Boo overcomes her fear of Randall and attacks him, enabling Sulley to catch him. Sulley and Mike hurl Randall through a door to a trailer, where two residents mistake him for an alligator and beat him with a shovel. Sulley and Mike then destroy the door to prevent Randall's return.

When Mike and Sulley locate Boo's door, Waternoose, accompanied by the CDA, bring it down to the scare floor. Mike distracts the CDA while Sulley and Boo escape with her door, leading Waternoose into the simulation room where he reveals his and Randall's plans of saving the company by kidnapping children to Sulley. Mike records the conversation, exposing him to the agents, and Waternoose is arrested by the CDA. The scare floor administrator Roz reveals herself to be the head of the CDA, working undercover. She thanks the two for their help and allows Sulley to return Boo home, but has the door demolished. Sulley's only memento of Boo is a shredded fragment of her door.

Inspired by his experiences with Boo, Sulley concocts a plan to retool the company's power generation method to harvest children's laughter instead of screams, as laughter is ten times more powerful. With the energy crisis solved, the factory is now focused on making children laugh to collect energy; Mike becomes the company's top comedian and Sulley is named the new CEO leader. Mike reveals to Sulley he has rebuilt Boo's door, which only works with all the pieces. Sulley inserts his fragment, enters and is recognized by Boo.

Production

Development

The idea for Monsters, Inc., along with ideas that would eventually become A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo, and Wall-E was conceived in a lunch in 1994 attended by John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft during the near completion of Toy Story. One of the ideas that came out of the brainstorming session was a film about monsters. "When we were making Toy Story", Docter said, "everybody came up to me and said 'Hey, I totally believed that my toys came to life when I left the room.' So when Disney asked us to do some more films, I wanted to tap into a childlike notion that was similar to that. I knew monsters were coming out of my closet when I was a kid. So I said, 'Hey, let's do a film about monsters.'"

Docter began work on the film that was to become Monsters, Inc. in 1996 while others focused on A Bug's Life (1998) and Toy Story 2 (1999). Its code name was Hidden City, named for Docter's favourite restaurant in Point Richmond. By early-February 1997, Docter had drafted a treatment together with Harley Jessup, Jill Culton, and Jeff Pidgeon that bore some resemblance to the final film. Docter pitched the story to Disney with some initial artwork on February 4 that year. He and his story team left with some suggestions in hand and returned to pitch a refined version of the story on May 30. At this pitch meeting, long-time Disney animator Joe Grant – whose work stretched back to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) – suggested the title Monsters, Inc., a play on the title of a gangster film Murder, Inc, which stuck. The film marks the first Pixar feature to not be directed by Lasseter instead being helmed by Docter, as well as Lee Unkrich and David Silverman who served as co-directors. The early test of Monsters Inc was released on October 11, 1998.

Writing

The storyline took on many forms during production. Docter's original idea featured a 30-year-old man dealing with monsters that he drew in a book as a child coming back to bother him as an adult. Each monster represented a fear he had, and conquering those fears caused the monsters to eventually disappear.

After Docter scrapped the initial concept of a 30-year-old terrified of monsters, he decided on a buddy story between a monster and a child titled simply Monsters, in which the monster character of Sulley (known at this stage as Johnson) was an up-and-comer at his workplace, where the company's purpose was to scare children. Sulley's eventual sidekick, Mike Wazowski, had not yet been added.

Between 1996 and 2000, the lead monster and child went through radical changes as the story evolved. As the story continued to develop, the child varied in age and gender. Ultimately, the story team decided that a girl would be the best counterpart for a furry, 8-foot-tall (2.4 m) co-star. After a girl was settled upon, the character continued to undergo changes, at one point being from Ireland and at another time being an African-American character. Originally, the character of the little girl, known as Mary, became a fearless seven-year-old who has been toughened by years of teasing and pranks from four older brothers. In stark contrast, Johnson is nervous about the possibility of losing his job after the boss at Monsters, Inc. announces a downsizing is on the way. He feels envious because another scarer, Ned (who later became Randall), is the company's top performer. Through various drafts, Johnson's occupation went back-and-forth from being a scarer and from working in another area of the company such as a janitor or a refinery worker, until his final incarnation as the best scarer at Monsters, Inc. Throughout development, Pixar worried that having a main character whose main goal was to scare children would alienate audiences and make them not empathize with him. Docter would later describe that the team "bent over backwards trying to create a story that still had monsters" while still attempting to solve the problem. A key moment came when the team decided "Okay, he's the BEST scarer there. He's the star quarterback" with Docter noting that before that moment "design after design, we really didn't know what he was about." Disney noted to Pixar early on that they did not want the character to "look like a guy in a suit". To this end, Johnson was originally planned to have tentacles for feet; however, this caused many problems in early animation tests. The idea was later largely rejected, as it was thought that audiences would be distracted by the tentacles. Mary's age also differed from draft to draft until the writers settled on the age of 3. "We found that the younger she was, the more dependent she was on Sulley", Docter said.

Eventually, Johnson was renamed Sullivan. Sullivan was also planned to wear glasses throughout the film. However, the creators found it a dangerous idea because the eyes were a perfectly readable and clear way of expressing a character's personality; thus, this idea was also rejected.

The idea of a monster buddy for the lead monster emerged at an April 6, 1998 "story summit" in Burbank with employees from Disney and Pixar. A term coined by Lasseter, a "story summit" was a crash exercise that would yield a finished story in only two days. Such a character, the group agreed, would give the lead monster someone to talk to about his predicament. Development artist Ricky Nierva drew a concept sketch of a rounded, one-eyed monster as a concept for the character, and everyone was generally receptive to it. Docter named the character Mike for the father of his friend Frank Oz, a director and Muppet performer. Jeff Pidgeon and Jason Katz story-boarded a test in which Mike helps Sulley choose a tie for work, and Mike Wazowski soon became a vital character in the film. Originally, Mike had no arms and had to use his legs as appendages; however, due to some technical difficulties, arms were soon added to him.

Screenwriter Daniel Gerson joined Pixar in 1999 and worked on the film with the filmmakers on a daily basis for almost two years. He considered it his first experience in writing a feature film. He explained, "I would sit with Pete Docter and David Silverman and we would talk about a scene and they would tell me what they were looking for. I would make some suggestions and then go off and write the sequence. We'd get together again and review it and then hand it off to a story artist. Here's where the collaborative process really kicked in. The board artist was not beholden to my work and could take liberties here and there. Sometimes, I would suggest an idea about making the joke work better visually. Once the scene moved on to animation, the animators would plus the material even further."

Docter has cited the 1973 film Paper Moon as inspiration for the concept of someone experiencing getting stuck with a kid who turns out to be the real expert, and he credits Lasseter for coming up with the “laughter is ten times more powerful than fear” concept.

Casting

Bill Murray was considered for the voice role of James P. "Sulley" Sullivan. He screen tested for the role and was interested, but when Pete Docter was unable to make contact with him, he took it as a "no". The voice role of Sulley went to John Goodman, the longtime co-star of the comedy series Roseanne and a regular in the films of the Coen brothers. Goodman interpreted the character to himself as the monster equivalent of a National Football League player. "He's like a seasoned lineman in the tenth year of his career," he said at the time. "He is totally dedicated and a total pro." Billy Crystal, having regretted turning down the part of Buzz Lightyear years prior, accepted that of Mike Wazowski, Sulley's one-eyed best friend and scare assistant.

Animation The "door vault" scene is one of the film's most elaborate sets.

In November 2000, early in the production of Monsters, Inc., Pixar packed up and moved for the second time since its Lucasfilm Ltd. years. The company's approximately 500 employees had become spread among three buildings, separated by a busy highway. The company moved from Point Richmond to a much bigger campus in Emeryville, co-designed by Lasseter and Steve Jobs.

In production, the film differed from earlier Pixar features, as every main character in this movie had its own lead animator – John Kahrs on Sulley, Andrew Gordon on Mike, and Dave DeVan on Boo. Kahrs found that the "bearlike quality" of Goodman's voice provided an exceptionally good fit with the character. He faced a difficult challenge, however, in dealing with Sulley's sheer mass; traditionally, animators conveyed a figure's heaviness by giving it a slower, more belaboured movement, but Kahrs was concerned that such an approach to a central character would give the film a "sluggish" feel. Like Goodman, Kahrs came to think of Sulley as a football player, one whose athleticism enabled him to move quickly in spite of his size. To help the animators with Sulley and other large monsters, Pixar arranged for Rodger Kram, a University of California, Berkeley expert on the locomotion of heavy mammals, to lecture on the subject.

Adding to Sulley's lifelike appearance was an intense effort by the technical team to refine the rendering of fur. Other production houses had tackled realistic fur, most notably Rhythm & Hues in its 1993 polar bear commercials for Coca-Cola and in its talking animals' faces in the 1995 film Babe. This film, however, required fur on a much larger scale. From the standpoint of Pixar's engineers, the quest for fur posed several significant challenges; one was to figure out how to animate a large number of hairs – 2,320,413 of them on Sulley – in a reasonably efficient way, and another was to make sure that the hairs cast shadows on other ones. Without self-shadowing, either fur or hair takes on an unrealistic flat-coloured look (e.g., in Toy Story, the hair on Andy's toddler sister, as seen in that movie's opening sequence, is hair without self-shadowing).

The first fur test allowed Sulley to run an obstacle course. Results were not satisfactory, as such objects caught and stretched out the fur due to the extreme amount of motion. Another similar test was also unsuccessful, because, this time, the fur went through the objects.

Pixar then set up a Simulation department and created a new fur simulation program called Fizt (short for "physics tool"). After a shot with Sulley in it had been animated, this department took the data for that shot and added Sulley's fur. Fizt allowed the fur to react in a more natural way. Every time when Sulley had to move, his fur (automatically) reacted to his movements, thus taking the effects of wind and gravity into account as well. The Fizt program also controlled the movement of Boo's clothes, which provided another "breakthrough". The deceptively simple-sounding task of animating cloth was also a challenge to animate thanks to those hundreds of creases and wrinkles that automatically occurred in the clothing when the wearer moved. Also, this meant they had to solve the complex problem of how to keep cloth untangled – in other words, to keep it from passing through itself when parts of it intersect. Fizt applied the same system to Boo's clothes as to Sulley's fur. First of all, Boo was animated shirtless; the Simulation department then used Fizt to apply the shirt over Boo's body, and every time she moved, her clothes also reacted to her movements in a more natural manner.

To solve the problem of cloth-to-cloth collisions, Michael Kass, Pixar's senior scientist, was joined on Monsters, Inc. by David Baraff and Andrew Witkin and developed an algorithm they called "global intersection analysis" to handle the problem. The complexity of the shots in the film, including elaborate sets such as the door vault, required more computing power to render than any of Pixar's earlier efforts combined. The render farm in place for Monsters, Inc. was made up of 3500 Sun Microsystems processors, compared with 1400 for Toy Story 2 and only 200 for Toy Story, both built on Sun's own RISC-based SPARC processor architecture.

The scene in which the Harryhausen's restaurant was decontaminated was originally going to feature the restaurant being blown up. Due to the September 11 attacks, the explosion was replaced by a plasma dome.

Release/Reception/Box Office

The film premiered on October 28, 2001, at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, California. It was theatrically released on November 2, 2001 in the United States, in Australia on December 26, 2001, and in the United Kingdom on February 8, 2002. The theatrical release was accompanied by the Pixar short animated film For the Birds.

As with A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2, a montage of "outtakes" and a performance of a play based on a line from the film were made and included in the end credits of the film starting on December 7, 2001.

After the success of the 3D re-release of The Lion King, Disney and Pixar re-released Monsters, Inc. in 3D on December 19, 2012.

Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a score of 96% based on 197 reviews, with an average score of 8.00/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Clever, funny, and delightful to look at, Monsters, Inc. delivers another resounding example of how Pixar elevated the bar for modern all-ages animation." Metacritic, which assigns a rating out of 100 top reviews from mainstream critics, calculated a score of 79 based on 35 reviews, indicating "generally favourable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore, gave the film a rare "A+" grade, becoming the second Pixar film to gain an "A+" grade, after Toy Story 2.

Charles Taylor of Salon magazine stated, "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." Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times gave it a positive review, praising the film's usage of "creative energy", saying "There hasn't been a film in years to use creative energy as efficiently as Monsters, Inc." Although Mike Clark of USA Today thought the comedy was sometimes "more frenetic than inspired and viewer emotions are rarely touched to any notable degree", he also viewed the film as "visually inventive as its Pixar predecessors".

ReelViews film critic James Berardinelli gave the film 31⁄2 stars out of 4 and wrote that the film was "one of those rare family films that parents can enjoy (rather than endure) along with their kids". Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 3 out of 4 stars, calling it "cheerful, high-energy fun, and like the other Pixar movies, has a running supply of gags and references aimed at grownups". Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B+" grade and praised the its animation, stating "Everything from Pixar Animation Studios – the snazzy, cutting-edge computer animation outfit – looks really, really terrific and unspools with a liberated, heppest-moms-and-dads-on-the-block iconoclasm."

Monsters, Inc. ranked number one at the box office on its opening weekend, grossing $62,577,067 in North America alone. The film had a small drop-off of 27.2% over its second weekend, earning another $45,551,028. In its third weekend, the film experienced a larger decline of 50.1%, placing itself in the second position just after Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. In its fourth weekend, however, there was an increase of 5.9%, making $24,055,001 that weekend for a combined $528 million. As of May 2013, it is the eighth-biggest fourth weekend ever for a film.

The film made $289,916,256 in North America, and $287,509,478 in other territories, for a worldwide $577,425,734. The film is Pixar's ninth highest-grossing film worldwide and sixth in North America. For a time, the film surpassed Aladdin as the second highest-grossing animated film of all time, only behind 1994's The Lion King.

In the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Malta, it earned £37,264,502 ($53,335,579), marking the sixth highest-grossing animated film of all time in the country and the thirty-second highest-grossing film of all time. In Japan, although earning $4,471,902 during its opening and ranking second behind The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring for the weekend, it moved to first place on subsequent weekends due to exceptionally small decreases or even increases and dominated for six weeks at the box office. It finally reached $74,437,612, standing as 2001's third highest-grossing film and the third largest U.S. animated feature of all time in the country behind Toy Story 3 and Finding Nemo.

Budget $115 million

Box office $577.4 million

My Review

Aside from Brave (which I loved), this might just be the best film Pixar has released. It's a really close race between it and The Incredibles for second best. And considering how wonderful their movies are, this isn't a bad place to finish. Unfortunately for the good folks at Disney, Monsters, Inc. could not have come out at a worse time. Just days after its release, the even better and more timeless Shrek was released--thereby stealing Monsters, Inc's thunder and resulting in its just being lost in the shuffle. It's a real shame, though, as this is a wonderful film from start to finish. The voices of the characters were great, computer animation tops and the story line, though silly, worked. But for me, the biggest surprise was that as a jaded adult and very critical person, I loved the cutesy addition to Baby Boo to the film. She was, without a doubt, the cutest thing I have ever seen but also was not gratuitously cute or nauseatingly cute. She was just a perfect addition to an otherwise great film. If you haven't seen this film, get off you behind and see it--it's great stuff and kids as well as adults will love this film.

This was a wonderful movie, with colourful characters, a fun storyline, and a funny and sometimes touching script. (I liked Shrek as well, but I slightly preferred this) I don't think it is quite as good as Toy Story, but I found it an enormously entertaining film, it was much better than I expected. The animation was truly excellent, with colourful and engaging backgrounds, and no stiff movements as far as I could see. I wasn't hugely keen on the song playing over the end credits, but compared to the overall goodness of the film, that is such a minor criticism, and it is fair to say that people have different tastes in music. The script was very, very funny, particularly with the character Roz. The voice talents were fantastic, John Goodman and Billy Crystal were brilliant as Sulley and Mike, Steve Buschemi clearly has a lot of seedy fun as Randall, Jennifer Tilly is wonderfully innocent as Mike's girlfriend, and the late James Coburn is wholly convincing as Waternoose. And I loved the character of Boo, she was so cute, and I loved the ending, people complained it was overly-sentimental but I thought it was so sweet. The story, as is always the case with Pixar films is highly original and charming, and doesn't drag at all. Overall, a wonderful film, truly entertaining and a must-see, and if you are starting to lose faith in Disney and their countless sequels, this is perfect for you. 9.5/10