By RUSSELL BAILLIE
(Herald rating: * * * * )
If, animation-wise, it's been the year of Shrek, then by rights it should be the summer of Monsters Inc. Coming from Pixar, the folks who brought us the two great Toy Story movies and the highly amusing A Bug's Life, Monsters,
Inc is certainly up to its predecessors in terms of technical detail, and towards the finale there are some eye-popping sequences.
Monsters, Inc takes us into a parallel universe inhabited by the things that go bump in the night. Some of those things are "scarers", whose job it is to frighten little kids as they sleep by creeping into their bedrooms via the portal of wardrobe doors, the juvenile screams that result being harnessed to supply power to the monsters' city. Only one rule: no touching the kids or the scarers might get contaminated.
While that might sound vaguely sinister, it's not. This one plays it for safe, sometimes cute laughs as it follows big, blue, furry Sulley (Goodman) and one-eyed Mike (Crystal), a steady scaring partnership on the way to setting a new record for most scares delivered. Only one day a cutey-pie kid comes back through the portal and into the monsters' world, where she soon has the local mutant population running scared.
Add a conspiracy plot involving a rival scarer, a brief banishment to the icy cave of the yeti and a bravura finale, and you've got rollicking entertainment.
It does hit some flat patches along the way, however, and its revelation that children's laughter actually supplies more energy than their screams is cloying in its delivery, reminding us that Pixar's backers are, after all, Disney.
Given its cuteness, you might wonder what someone with a keener sense of the sinister would have done with the same set-up. Or you might just sit back and enjoy this latest computer cartoon confection for what it is - an imaginative kid's story meets Pixar's latest upgrade.
Good fun, but not one of the animated greats.
Cast: Voices of Billy Crystal, John Goodman
Director: Pete Docter
Rating: G
Running time: 96 mins
Screening: Village, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas
By RUSSELL BAILLIE
(Herald rating: * * * * )
If, animation-wise, it's been the year of Shrek, then by rights it should be the summer of Monsters Inc. Coming from Pixar, the folks who brought us the two great Toy Story movies and the highly amusing A Bug's Life, Monsters,
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