Monsters University was a great deal of fun at the time but I've come to think that it's the ultimate triumph of storytelling over story.

The story is VERY familiar: part Animal House, part Revenge of the Nerds (not to mention a fair bit of Harry Potter and Sky High). The plot hinges entirely on Mike and Sully knocking over a trophy, which is about as thin as it gets. And the scheme to get back into the scare program involves winning a team competition in scaring, even tho scaring is not a team effort and actual scaring is literally the last thing they are required to do.

So: storywise, it's a mess.

BUT, the storyTELLING is terrific. It's funny, it has heart, the animation is enchanting, there's solid setup and payoff, the characters are memorable and have clear arcs, and the cinematography backs up the storytelling (the commentary talks about the use of lighting to reinforce emotion).

So: the WAY the story is told overrides the problems with the story itself.

The best examples of this are probably...
1. Mike is somehow getting straight As in the scare program even tho the entire point of his arc is that he is not at all scary. The film does this very careful thing of suggesting that Mike gets good grades because he works hard to have the book-learned answers but just doesn't have "it". But there's no way around the fact that you should not be getting As in scaring if you can't scare.

2. Mike and Sully get kicked out of school despite accomplishing one of the greatest scares of all time right in front of the exact person to appreciate it AND who could keep them from getting kicked out. Instead the dean continues her unbroken run of being an unbelievable cunt... right up to her REDEMPTION SCENE. That's right: a redemption instead of a comeuppance, a bizarre scene that amounts to "I don't completely hate you. Here's a newspaper showing you getting arrested. Have a nice life!" And the audience is somehow left thinking "oh, she's not so bad after all." It's bizarre.

What the movie probably should have done is have Mike realize on his own that he's never going to beat rival Sully, and then they decide that they really just want to beat Johnny and his gang, so Mike helps Sully become truly great. They become a real team in what is usually thought of as a singular pursuit, and the dashing of Mike's dreams is not the climax of the story. You could even have the greatest-scare-ever sequence by having ROR kidnap Mike and toss him into the human world and Sully go in to retrieve him, creating real-world stakes above and beyond the competition.

Last edited by Zarban (2013-12-28 17:44:20)