Dan Scanlon makes warm family films about friendship, brotherhood and disappointment. We like his care for the characters, though Monsters University finds more invention in its creatures than in the college comedy they have been given.
Fi1m perspective
In Monsters University (2013), the monster designs offer more surprises than the student pranks. Dan Scanlon’s college comedy is good company, but its familiar underdog plotting keeps it from being much more. Taking the characters back to their student days gives him a friendship worth following through the competitions. We warmed to that friendship because Billy Crystal and John Goodman make the two leads worth spending time with. The film also takes an interest in what happens when ambition exceeds ability, a subject family entertainment can usefully address without giving anyone a lecture.
The route to Monsters University ran through storyboarding and the short Mater and the Ghostlight (2006), which he co-directed. It is a background that suits a film with clear goals and an ensemble built around a competition. Scanlon shares the Monsters University screenplay credit with Robert L. Baird and Dan Gerson. Together they keep the story easy to follow, but there are stretches when the next step is too easy to anticipate.
The Scare Games give the students something to do, yet generate little suspense because the underdog competition follows such familiar steps. Several pranks could have been written for human students, which wastes the possibilities of the monster designs. The middle stretch needs a stranger idea and too often settles for another contest. We would happily trade some of the orderly plotting for a joke that could only happen on this campus.
Onward (2020) took Scanlon towards an original fantasy road trip, which he directed and co-wrote, with brotherhood and memory as central concerns. Producer Kori Rae worked with him on both features. The everyday relationships amid fantastical surroundings suggest continuity rather than a wholesale change of approach. For a first encounter, we would choose Monsters University for Crystal and Goodman, with fair warning that the competition is less interesting than the friendship.
Biography
Dan Scanlon is an American filmmaker, storyboard artist and animator. He joined Pixar Animation Studios in 2001 as a story artist on Cars and Toy Story 3. He co-directed the short film Mater and the Ghostlight (2006) and made his feature directorial debut with the Pixar film Monsters University (2013), on which he also received screenplay and story credits.
Scanlon subsequently directed Onward (2020), which received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. He studied at the Columbus College of Art and Design, graduating with a BFA in 1998. Earlier in his career he worked as an animator and storyboard artist on several direct-to-video animated films.
