Monsters University

Monsters University is an enjoyable college comedy whose strongest reason to exist is still the friendship between its leads. Dan Scanlon takes the characters back to their student days, where an underdog story offers plenty of opportunities for jokes and fewer for surprise. The film is good company, though its campus is more inventive than much of what happens there. Its more interesting concern is how ambition survives contact with actual ability, a useful subject for a family film to approach without scolding.

Billy Crystal and John Goodman do most of the work that makes this worth following. Billy Crystal gives Mike a restless urgency, while John Goodman’s Sullivan has enough ease to keep their exchanges from becoming a competition for the funniest line. As the friendship develops, the animation pays attention to how the pair move together, letting their changing relationship appear in their physical behaviour. That careful physical acting gives the familiar friendship story some credibility, even when the plot around it is easy to anticipate.

Ricky Nierva’s production design gives the university enough detail to reward looking beyond whoever is speaking. The peripheral monsters have shapes and proportions that make them funny before they have done anything, and their variety is a pleasure in itself. Cinematographers Jean-Claude Kalache and Matt Aspbury keep the crowded campus legible rather than letting all that detail compete for attention. The visual clarity matters in a comedy with this many characters, allowing the individual designs to remain distinct within the busy surroundings.

The screenplay by Robert L. Baird, Dan Scanlon and Dan Gerson is much less adventurous. The Scare Games give the students something to do, but the underdog competition follows too many familiar steps to generate much suspense. Several college pranks feel as though they could have been written for human students, which seems a waste of such a flexible cast of creatures. The middle stretch is where the film most needs a stranger idea, and where it most often settles for another familiar contest.

Greg Snyder’s editing keeps those stretches moving, and the pace is brisk without making the friendship feel hurried. At 104 minutes, however, the film has room for more supporting characters than it can make memorable. Randy Newman’s marching-band music supplies the proper collegiate bustle, then keeps supplying it after the setting has made its point. The insistence becomes tiring, and some jokes would land better with less encouragement.

Helen Mirren gives Dean Hardscrabble an amusing lack of patience. We laughed at her stony delivery, because she treats this ridiculous institution as though its standards were beyond discussion. Her severity stops these scenes from becoming quite as cosy as the rest. Steve Buscemi’s Randy gets less opportunity to register, and several of the supporting monsters are more memorable for their appearance than anything they say.

Family comedies can become exhausting when every ambition comes with a guarantee of success, and this one is interested in what happens when enthusiasm is not enough. It takes young hopes seriously while allowing some doubt about where they might lead. That gives adults something to discuss without making children sit through a lecture. Give it a family evening, with some patience reserved for the more routine student antics.