MONSTERS UNIVERSITY

While their future selves will contend with world-ending peril, the morality of fear, and the fundamental nature of society and their role in it, ‘Monsters University’, for its majority, aims significantly lower. Struggling for a consistent tone and a compelling narrative, it plays as a confused unofficial remake of ‘Revenge of the Nerds’, complete with frat house highjinks, study montages, and an evil Dean (voiced by Helen Mirren).

The film’s intended audience is the most puzzling of its disparate elements: who exactly is the film for? Much of its satire plays into its university setting, but the jokes, word play, and slapstick are resolutely G-rated. Granted, the original film found success and cross-generational appeal in fairly adult concepts and situations; the character of Boo, the little girl trapped in the monster realm, went some way to bridging the original’s gap between content and tone. But ‘Monsters University’ never finds a compromise that lands, relying on our existing affinity for the two protagonists to carry its drama, and the foregone knowledge that things will work out right in the end.

The film’s one concession is a shift late in its second act, which forms most of the fake-out climax (a clumsy trend Pixar is increasingly indulging). The realisation that no matter how hard you try, you may not achieve your dreams – life, no matter what you’ve been raised to believe, is not entirely fair – is a bitter, soul-crushing rite of passage: one explicitly reserved for those transitioning from the realm of child to adulthood. This revelation is all to brief, however, and too lost in the nearly two-hour runtime to really make an impact.

That success doesn’t come easy – not in real life, and not for Mike and Sully – is a return to the emotionally honest kind of filmmaking that, in essence, Pixar made its name with – and an irony they would do well to remember.