Pete Docter
Monsters & Co

However you look at it, despite the two “Toy Story” films that preceded it, Pixar's golden decade begins here. The golden age that would lead to the creation of works such as “The Incredibles” (2004); “Ratatouille” (2007); “Wall-E” (2008); “Up” (2009); “Toy Story 3 – The Great Escape” (2010) starts thanks to what, in my opinion, is Pixar's true masterpiece, “Monsters, Inc.,” released in 2001, technically and narratively superior, by far, to the first two “Toy Story” films. It grossed $579,723,768 worldwide, of which $290,642,256 was in North America alone, and it achieved the rare feat of uniting both the audience and critics, so much so that it won 1 Oscar (Best Original Song: “If I Didn’t Have You,” composed by Randy Newman, finally winning the coveted statuette after 15 failed nominations) and narrowly lost the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, a category newly introduced that year, with the award undeservedly going to the less compelling “Shrek” (the cynics, with some justification, claimed that the category was invented that year just to allow the green ogre, a Dreamworks production, Spielberg, you understand, to win).

In the imaginary city of Monstropolis, the screams of children frightened by monsters who enter sneakily through a door leading to another world into the children's rooms provide the energy for the power plant of said city. “Monsters, Inc.” is the company responsible for this, and Sulley and Mike are stars at the workplace, especially Sulley, who holds the record for scares and terrified children.

Pete Docter, one of Pixar's bosses, directs. He pondered the idea of such a film since 1994, right during the production of the first “Toy Story.” If humans were unaware that toys could animate in their absence, why not invent a parallel world where monsters lived and thrived in abundance without humans, the parallel world itself, knowing anything about it? Stashed away, the idea resurfaced in 1997 during the production of the excellent and somewhat forgotten “A Bug's Life.” Over a working lunch, Joe Grant, an animation veteran and former Disney assistant back in the time of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” suggested the film’s title to Docter, “Monsters, Inc.” (the original idea was the more banal “Monsters”). Docter got to work and, alongside the Pixar team (including John Lasseter, obviously), drew the first monsters, and childhood memories quickly emerged. Inspired by American fantasy cinema of the '50s and '60s, he invented a world populated by monsters that could have emerged from the imagination of Ray Harryhausen (who remembers, for example, “Jason and the Argonauts,” 1963, and the famous battle with the skeletons, animated by Harryhausen himself?) so much that the trendy restaurant where all the monsters of “Monsters, Inc.” dine is named, unsurprisingly, Harryhausen. Some ideas are, to say the least, genius: the factory owner, Henry J. Waternoose III, a sort of huge crab, seems to come out of a stop-motion from thirty years before; Celia Mae, the “Monsters, Inc.” receptionist, with one eye and a slender neck, is a miracle of fantasy, but even more complex and surprising is the animation of the fur covering Sulley’s body, a feat of computer technique where every minute bodily detail is animated as never, and I mean never, seen in an animated film (it was the most difficult thing to achieve, with 30 Pixar animators working on it).

In 1999, the film is almost complete, at the level of the subject, only missing one figure, the one who would stand alongside Sulley. Thus is born the figure of Mike, a round green creature with two legs and a frequently irritable voice. With Mike's entry, the gags of the two protagonists can also be written because, aside from the plot, the film thrives on the contrast between a gigantic and frightening monster, who is actually very kind, and a tiny little monster less good than it seems. It's a film with many references, sometimes it's unclear how intended they are. Do Sulley and Mike nod to Laurel and Hardy (unlikely) or the two droids in “Star Wars”? (more probable). Does the game of doors, magnificently and tumultuously culminated in the splendid finale (which would raise many questions about the existence of an infinity of parallel worlds, making the multiverse seem trivial), echo Borges? Certainly, as mentioned, the world of monsters and screams comes from beloved, respected distant cinema cherished by Docter and Pixar, and, as often happens in these films, alongside the action, the rhythm, the fun, and the laughter, poetry always peeks in, and the final sequence is truly poetic. It lasts five seconds, in the end it's just a smile from Sulley directed at the little girl who, unwittingly, disrupted the monsters' world, but Pixar needed very little, I would say nothing, to create a touching moment at the end of such an entertaining film.

A semi-masterpiece to which, perhaps, a sometimes dizzying pace could be detrimental (the finale is just right as it is, but maybe could have been slowed down at times); nevertheless, it's a work so meticulously crafted in every small detail that it deserves (at least, that's how I see it) the title of best Pixar film. It's a pity that, short on ideas, in 2013 they decided to give it a sequel, the rather lackluster “Monsters University,” which is technically impeccable and even funny, but lacks all the visual genius, the referential humor, the idea of the doors, and the anarchic strength of the original. Essentially, it flattens everything out in favor of a younger audience. After a string of masterpieces like those listed at the beginning of the review, Pixar had used up all its ammunition. Then came “Inside Out” and changed everything. Thank goodness.