“You filled your quota on the first kid of the day.”
Take 1: Again, Monsters, Inc. genuinely enchants me with its story of male work/life partners that yearn to adopt a baby they can’t make on their own.
Take 2: All hail Pixar, through which our entertainment-overlords produce the “feels” somewhere in Emeryville, California. Now ubiquitous with ancillary tie-ins as varied as flatware and mass couture, Pixar’s movies have raised two generations on the good vibes of friendship, community-building, and high-speed adventure. Where there were once moments of static background and flat characters in small- and big-screen cartoons, Pixar has made animation the locus for technical innovation combined with storytelling simplicity driven by memorable characters. The resulting brand, “Pixar,” involves the combination of computer technicians, graphic artists, sound designers, and flesh and blood performers, and it is a reliable guide for entertainment consumers the world over.
Given the times, it’s impossible to consider Pixar’s output and be unimpressed with the commercial and artistic success of such franchise entertainments as Toy Story (1995-2019) and one-offs like WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008). The texture, narrative polish, and velocity of these movies, often connecting a short film with a feature, as in WALL-E’s companion BURN-E (Angus MacLane, 2008), is unlike anything before or since the company’s founding in 1986.
George Lucas was then the filmmaker-producer-licensor behind the Star Wars universe who sold his graphics company to Steve Jobs, then looking for the next big innovation in Graphical User Interface. Incidentally, this hand-off from movie studio to computer manufacturer helped establish the now-unremarkable combination of Big Technology with Big Entertainment long before Silicon Valley called the shots for Wall Street and Main Street.
At the end of the last millennium—in fact, it’s possible to see the birth of this century as a world bequeathed to us by so many busy Emeryvillians—Pixar was the leading edge of movie animation, eclipsing the Disney machine and such other stalwart companies as Studio Ghibli and Aardman. This achievement, alone, is worth consideration as a business school case study, but the truly remarkable achievement of Pixar, aside from the mountains of wealth it has created, is the professional sheen of mastery poured into each project.
Pixar’s hallmark is consistency. Having figured out a successful formula—fantasy worlds that provide emotional impact through characters that easily model toys and video game avatars—Pixar corporate leadership designed a release schedule to capitalize on well-groomed spectator habits by providing loads of calendar specific hooks; meaning, the Pixar oeuvre is best-described as “product,” just like the cars and trucks of the Detroit auto companies. These are movies so finely produced that there is almost no risk involved because the whole operation, from idea inception through exhibition, is driven by committee group-think and the outlay of hundreds of millions of production dollars. The Pixar ethos, then, is attract children but reward their parents while offending no one because this is the greatest spectacle in moviemaking technology possible.
In 2001, Pete Docter directed the fourth Pixar feature, Monsters, Inc., and he used every trick in the then-new Pixar playbook. He presents a parallel world to our own in which monsters nightly haunt the dreams of children by scaring them and then harvesting resultant screams as the energy source for the monsters’ home world, Monstropolis. The bridge from here to there is a simple bedroom closet, and the adventure takes shape as we meet a pair of factory-line monster scarers, Mike (Billy Crystal) and Sully (John Goodman), who make the discovery that children’s laughter is more powerful than any scream ever could be. The trouble is that the scream utility they work for is corrupt and unable to accept the fact that children are beautiful, and it should be the job of monsters to get along with them.
There is a reptile villain called Randall (Steve Buscemi), a set of helpful and funny supporting characters, and several fast-moving set pieces of such wonder that I can recall sitting in a theater in late 2001 and repeatedly wondering, “How did they do that?” The that in question being a bit of creature design worth considering at length.
Sully is a large blue monster. He has horns, fangs, and claws, and he’s covered in fur, mostly blue with purple tufts on his joints. The thing of it is, Sully’s fur isn’t a static field of bright color and shadow; his whole-body shimmers as the character moves through Monstropolis, realizing that the little girl he’s become attached to, Boo (Mary Gibbs), isn’t dangerous to monster kind.
Mike takes a series of pratfalls based on the fact he has no torso, just a single eye that occupies his head-body, and Sully moves along behind him, his hairs moving individually with the currents of his activities, whether running or swinging from rafters. It’s a triumph of unequalled technical brilliance, which has haunted my sense of magic ever sense, and it’s a technically outrageous choice to enhance production design that is equally resonant at the level of story.
Why?
Sully is the greatest scarer in Monstropolis, and we see him scare numerous characters into quivering fright, even tears. When the camera/computer shifts below his tall form, mimicking a pattern long-used by cinematographers to exhibit control and dominance, he is truly fearsome. When relaxed, though, he’s a cuddly, soft-looking, sweetheart of a monster who becomes Boo’s protector. This switch from horror scape to throw pillow is contained in those blue and purple body hairs, all the many thousands of them moving by design, often in different directions, depending on Sully’s present difficulties and whatever story point he’s involved with.
Designing Sully this way is a technical marvel that enhances his three-dimensionality, further improved through Goodman’s voice work, transforming him into favored-uncle status for so many viewers. Having now seen the movie many times across many years, including several screenings of Sully’s extended universe in the de rigueur (and excellent) sequel Monsters University (Dan Scanlon, 2013), I can report that Monsters, Inc. shouldn’t be so successful (it is corporate product, after all), but it remains a masterpiece. The skillful use of a tried and true formula should be less convincing, but the imagineers of Emeryville pulled no punches in the construction of a world that is thematically connected to our recent past but equally driven by the unusual harmony of different kinds of creatures making a family.
–July 31, 2021
