Monsters University

It's almost the end of the school year here in Las Vegas. Lessons are basically done, and today was the last day kids could turn in assignments. Finals are next week. So what does that mean? Teachers show movies. I've been scrambling to find G-rated films to show that I could watch three times in one day. I hadn't seen Monsters University, the 2013 prequel to the Pixar hit Monsters, Inc., and figured it couldn't be too bad.

And it wasn't bad. It wasn't up to Pixar standards, but even a routine movie from them is far better than most animated fare. Again we have Mike Wazoskwi, who's basically an eyeball on legs, but this time we follow him as a young monster who dreams of becoming a "scarer," those monsters that pop out of children's closets and make them scream. I seem to remember something about how the screams created energy, but I forget it all.

Mike grows up and attends the title school of higher learning. He's not really very scary, but dreams die hard. He meets Sully (again voiced by John Goodman), who's a natural scarer but not much of a student. For an infraction they are kicked out of the scarer program by the scary dean (Helen Mirren, who has both wings and multiple legs). Mike decides to take the worst fraternity on campus and mold them into a team to challenge the others in the "Scare Olympics."

So what we have here is the template for standard college movies like Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, but without the sex and drinking and with monsters. It works. The director, Dan Scanlon, keeps things moving, and there are many imaginative monsters. The loser fraternity is particularly good--I liked Dan Carlton, a middle-aged monster with a bowling-ball gut who decides to quit sales and go back to school. Their fraternity house belongs to the mom of one of them, and they hold their initiation  in the basement, complete with dark cloaks and wooden paddles, while she does laundry.

Along with Goodman, Bill Crystal is back as Mike and Steve Buscemi as Randy Boggs, and we see the genesis of his rivalry with Sully. Part of me thinks that making light of childhood nightmares is a bit sadistic, but kids love monsters. I know I did. I had a book when I was a tyke called How to Feed and Care For Your Monster. I'll let psychologists explain why.