From July 13, 2013
SCORE: A
As with all Pixar movies, ‘Monsters University’ was great! Very funny and endearing.
I really like how the beginning of the movie starts with Mike in elementary school going on a field trip to the Monsters Inc. factory that he will work at later in life. From there the film jumps to when Mike goes to college, to Monsters University. There he meets Randall and Sulley. (And if you look hard enough, you’ll see George Sanderson, the monster in the first film that gets decontaminated by the CDA. And if you wait around through the credits there’s a cameo by Henry Waternoose, Mike and Sulley’s boss from the first film.)
The monsters in Oozma Kappa are all great characters, with Art being my obvious favorite. He’s a crazy design and looks more like a muppet to me than a Pixar monster, but that adds to his coolness for me. (UPDATE: I went to the CTN Expo in 2013 and saw an interview with Disney animator Eric Goldberg. At the end of the interview he explained that the character Don Carlton is based on his appearance. Hehe. Brilliant!)
The animation in the whole movie is fantastic as always. And the characters look amazing, with Pixar’s program that scatters light within the CG model’s skin (that they developed during ‘The Incredibles’). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_scattering
And I absolutely LOVE the music in ‘Monsters University’. The college band music makes me want to go back to college.
Speaking of college, they clearly based ‘Monsters University’ on UC Berkeley, which is awesome! The Scare School building is based on Doe Library (from UC Berkeley), complete with a campanile in the background. And the archway into MU looks like Sather Gate. And there’s a building Mike sees while he’s on campus tour that looks like a cross between the Valley Life Sciences Building and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Oh, and later on in the film you get to see the backend of Monsters Inc. and there are structure based on the giant port cranes at the Port of Oakland.
Hehe. I love it!
By the way, the fact that Mike and Sulley meet in college in ‘Monsters University’ doesn’t make sense because there’s a line in the first film where Mike says, “You’ve been jealous of my good looks since the 4th grade,”... but then they don’t meet until college, according to ‘Monsters University’. But if you listen to the commentary on the DVD, they do bring this up, but they were told by John Lasseter or Andrew Stanton that you can’t have your hands tied by little things like that.
Lastly, I personally think that they should have named this film ‘Monster University’ instead of ‘MONSTERS University’ only because I think it rolls off the tongue better, but that’s just me. I also still prefer the title ‘The Bear and the Bow’ to ‘Brave’, but whatever.
