Back to School: MONSTERS UNIVERSITY

The biggest problem Pixar has is an imbalance of expectations. Back five or ten years ago, when they were in the middle of a string of masterpieces – Wall-E, Up, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, among others – they seemed like a studio that could do little wrong. They released one gorgeously animated, surprisingly moving, and hugely satisfying movie after the next and for a while it seemed like that would always be the case. Now, after a string of merely enjoyable entertainments that not only weren’t heartbreaking works of visual inventiveness, but also rarely were working towards that goal, some have started shrugging off Pixar films as somehow less than adequate. As if expertly calibrated mass appeal crowd-pleasers are a thing of which we have an overabundance these days. 

Pixar’s latest is Monsters University, a prequel to their 2001 hit Monsters, Inc. This setting, a world of monsters in which all energy comes from scream power generated by sending creatures through portals in the shape of children’s closet doors, is Pixar’s most colorful and cartoonish. The design features an appealing bunch of candy-colored monsters, likable and vaguely frightening in the right light with the right sound design. They’re more cute than creepy, like smoothly animated Harryhausen characters inspired by one part Hieronymus Bosch, three parts Hanna-Barbera. The first film introduced us to the exceedingly endearing pair of Mike, a one-eyed green ball with the voice of Billy Crystal, and Sully, a furry blue bear with the voice of John Goodman. Together they were the best scarers in the business. Rather than attempting to build further narrative after the events of that film, which has a story that tidily fixes all that world’s major problems, we’ve wandered back in time with a charming prequel. This new film rewinds to find them college freshman.

This proves to be a fruitful move. Though their emotional arc from competitors to best friends is obvious, doubly so by knowing where they must end up, there’s plenty of bright, funny detail to fill up a film that uses the setting to great effect. The simple design details that go into fitting a college campus into this world alone provides plenty of delight. There are all the typical sights, from dorm rooms to classrooms and parties to parks, that you’d find in any college town, which makes the monsters roaming the halls and down the quad so appealingly strange and oddly familiar. They may have tentacles or three heads or breathe fire and are training to burst through your closet door roaring for a scream, but they still have to pass their exams and wonder if they’re cool enough to go to the party down the street. Monsters: they’re just like us.

Intimidating Dean Hardscrabble, Helen Mirren voicing a huge centipede with bat wings and a lizard face, introduces the annual Scare Games, a campus wide competition to prove who is the best student scarer. Mike and Sully both throw themselves into the competition with much to prove. The screenplay from Robert L. Baird, Daniel Gerson, and Dan Scanlon (who also directs) smartly makes Mike an underdog who has studiously worked his way into the University while Sully got in on a family name and big expectations. You can see their academic approaches in their postures, a nice subtle flourish of animation. There’s an interesting tension between them, but they also both have a lot to lose. To win is to remain in the scaring program. That makes it hard to be saddled with a team of adorable goofballs, the kind of ragtag group that fills out an instantly loveable ensemble: a pudgy middle-aged student with nerdy glasses and a Ron Swanson mustache (Joel Murray), a nice guy (Peter Sohn), a two-headed dance major (Sean Hayes and Dave Foley), and a hairy weirdo (Charlie Day). Why, they’re not as scary as the overconfident frat guys or the hissing sorority sisters. What hope does Team Oozma Kappa (great name) have? Even their team chant - "We're OK!" - leaves something to be desired.

With the competition, a sort of Triwizard Tournament for monsters, effectively turning the whole film into Pixar’s typical mad-scramble racing, chasing climax, the whole thing speeds right along. Through various challenges and obstacles that are cause for fun visual gags and impressive creature design, the zippy energy rarely flags. The film seems to take its cue from the rousing rat-a-tat drumline-driven fight song that Randy Newman has cooked up for the film’s setting, an expert clack of moving percussion parts playing in perfect, driving syncopation that powers the score. Monsters University is a lot of appealing parts played with great skill and falling into place with great precision. It’s a lively, funny G-rated campus comedy that’s been executed with beautifully detailed animation and a great deal of energetic momentum. It’s frame for frame the best-looking American animation since, well, the last Pixar film, and deals lightly and generously with some nice themes about being yourself, studying hard, and remaining honest and kind. The talented team behind the film has cooked up something special, harmonizing with the tone of the earlier film without relying solely upon our memories of it and filling the screen with plenty of visual whimsy to admire.

Monsters University may not match the emotional heights Pixar has proven capable of reaching. It doesn’t even come up with one sequence as good as its predecessor’s madcap chase through a rollercoaster of magic doors, but it’s still a film filled with delights. It has so many moving parts, endearing characters and visual pleasures – and pulls them all off so effortlessly – that it could be easy to scoff, as if such proficiency were easy to come by, as if other family films didn’t struggle to pull off even one of these goals. When a whispering librarian becomes a looming monstrosity when provoked by the slightest noise or an eager monster reveals the scaring techniques he’s studied are what we’d recognize as standard haunted-house horror movie tropes, there’s undeniable appeal. This film’s a two-hour smile and a likable echo of one of the studio’s earliest triumphs. Who’d want to turn down that offer? Even when working with a smaller emotional range and simpler plot, in a film that isn’t necessarily calibrated to make adults cry, Pixar is working with a whole different palate than their closest competitor. I wouldn’t trade one so-called minor Pixar effort for all the Ice Age and Madagascar movies in the world.

Nyuck to the Future: THE THREE STOOGES

Writer-directors Bobby and Peter Farrelly, from their early efforts Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary to more recent works like Stuck on You and last year’s giggling sex farce Hall Pass, have a commitment to broad slapstick and gross-out gags. So it makes a certain amount of sense that their long-in-development passion project is The Three Stooges, a lowest-common-denominator exhumation of silly, second-rate mid-20th century vaudevillian nonsense. You’d think that seeing Larry, Moe and Curly impersonators stumble around modern-day settings doing their same old eye-poking, pun-spitting, kicking, stomping, and whoop-whoop-whooping routine would be at best misguided, at worst unbearable. That’s almost the case here and yet there’s something so gleefully goofy and ecstatically, old-fashioned juvenile about the film that it ends up being something closer to warmhearted fan fiction, a tribute to childhood idols of a dubious kind.

The plot, such as it is, rests on a Catholic orphanage where the three little stooges were dropped off and subsequently raised. The patient nuns are the very funny Jane Lynch, Oscar-winning American Idol alum Jennifer Hudson, who gets a short musical number, Sports Illustrated’s latest swimsuit issue cover girl Kate Upton, and Larry David. Yes, that Larry David. They’re exasperated with the guys’ antics, but somehow, twenty-five years later, the guys are still hanging around. The Farrellys don’t really care to explain exactly why the guys are such weird anachronisms right out of the womb, leading to a sometimes off-putting mix of contemporary references and moments when the Stooges are utterly dumbfounded by modernity. What’s going on here? They have no clue what an iPhone is, but they know who C-3PO is? You just have to throw up your hands and go with it.

What’s especially surprising, and makes it easier to just go along with the movie’s silliness, is how skillfully the main cast inhabits the roles of the Stooges. At first, they seem to be ever so slightly not quite right, but as the movie went on I grew accustomed to them. They’re doing admirable work in a tough spot. Sean Hayes plays Larry with a scrunched up face and drawn out delivery while Chris Diamantopoulos squints and schemes from beneath a flat, black mop of hair as Moe. Meanwhile, Will Sasso delivers a pitch-perfect Curly, wiggling his bulk around with squirmy grace and fluidity while manipulating his voice with a squeaky falsetto. In other words, they’re the Stooges. They smack each other around with exaggerated sound effects and bumble through life spreading (somewhat unintentional) destruction, much to the consternation of those around them.

When the events of the plot finally kick into motion, it’s revealed that the orphanage is over $800,000 dollars in debt. The trio decides to set off to raise the money and save the orphans. (That one cute little orphan is also sick with a mysterious disease may be a bit too nakedly manipulative and heavy for such an otherwise bouncy lark.) It’s a fairly dusty premise, which only adds to the sense that the movie has been sucked through a hole in the space-time continuum and arrived at just the right speed and location to smack me upside the head. I sat dumbfounded as often as I was amused. It’s all just so straight-ahead slapstick and brightly lit episodic tomfoolery. The Farrellys can’t indulge in their usual R-rated sight gags, but that’s no loss here, since that’s not their intent. Besides, there are plenty of icky moments, like a scene in a nursery with urinating infants, or a scene in which a lion is hit in the boing-loings by a peanut shot out of a dolphin’s blowhole. There’s definitely a creeping sense of the surreal here. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t.

As the movie goes this way and that, sorting itself into three loose episodes differentiated by titles in the style of the old Stooges’ shorts, the Farrellys find plenty more hoary old story elements to utilize. There’s a cartoonish femme fatale (Sophia Vergara) involved in a murder plot that ropes in the Stooges and runs throughout the remainder of the film, though, given how much punishment these characters take without consequence, it’s an oddly low-stakes murder plot. There’s also a smarmy lawyer (Stephen Collins) and his slightly dimwitted son (Kirby Heyborne), not to mention a goofy thug (Craig Bierko), bumbling cops, a stern nurse, and a party full of snooty rich people and other eccentric types including a thickly accented French baker.

It’s a movie in which most jokes, simply by the nature of the story and the caricatures, can be seen coming from a mile away. Sometimes, these jokes just aren’t very funny and yet when they land, they land hard. When they did, I found myself laughing despite myself. A fairly early sequence that builds with exceptional escalation starts with the Stooges trying to fix a church steeple and culminates in a church bell sliding down and smacking a nun in head. Moe wonders who their victim was. Curly squeaks, “I dunno, but her face rings a bell!”

There’s something sort of sweet about the way the Farrellys pay tribute to the Stooges, in its own way like what Jason Segel and company did with The Muppets. For me, a little Three Stooges goes a long way whether they be new or old, but the enthusiasm of this movie is borderline contagious. The Farrelly brothers lovingly recreate the kind of slapdash, repetitive, hit-and-miss silliness of the Three Stooges while trying to say that the world today could use some good, uncomplicated pratfalls and broad wordplay now and then. An extended goofy plot point in the middle of the movie finds Moe accidentally becoming the newest cast member of Jersey Shore. It’s an odd moment – one that feels miscalculated and stale already – but it also serves as the film’s statement of purpose of sorts. As Moe smacks around these tanned, shallow, callow reality show stars, I could almost hear the Farrellys arguing that the popular shallow of old beats the popular shallow of today any day.