Fraternity of freaks

Film Review: Monsters University (U)
Running time 104 minutes
Rating:***
Just in time for the summer holidays, Disney’s Pixar Animation comes up with a new take on an old, established favourite that would keep the little ones entertained, were it not for that annoying yellow thing in the sky that keeps them amused outdoors.
Monsters University is a prequel to the 2001 hit Monsters Inc, which tells the story of how star characters Mike (Billy Crystal) and Sully (John Goodman) came to be the five-star ‘scarers’ of little children in the first movie.
While not the money-making machine that the Toy Story series turned out to be, Monsters Inc earned a perfectly respectable number of squillions, and those hard-up executives in Disney are hoping for the same again.
This time, as well as having to swallow the strange fact that the monster world is powered by the scream power of little children, this time, we must be persuaded that there is a university in America full of strange creatures learning the basics of scream technology.
Mike and Sully meet up on Freshers’ Day. They take an instant dislike to one another while being divided up into fraternities – which is similar to the British public school house system but with added cruelty and sad pranks.
Mike, despite being blue, with one big eye and lots of teeth, is not rated as scary and is dumped in the losers’ sorority. After an accident he annoys the fearsome Dean Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren), and both he and Sully look set to be booted out.
So, entertainingly, the pair and their fellow losers enter a scaring competition to impress the Dean and get back on the course.
This is great fun and will mightily amuse the young ones - and some older ones willing to risk all by pitching their lot with a cinema full of five-year-olds.
The animation, as you would expect from Pixar, is top-notch, and the storyline, as you would expect from Disney, is slick, human and sentimental.
Overall it’s a winner, but may be more quickly understood on the other side of the Atlantic, because strange as the world of Oxford and Cambridge is to many people, the world of American universities can be even stranger.
Some of the one-liners from Goodman and Crystal risk being lost on a UK audience and even the input of top British actors such as Mirren and Alfred Molina may not be enough to ensure that the product is universally engaging.
So, while some might find basic research into the American education system helpful to get the max from Monsters University, it’s probably sufficient to understand that characters such as Mike (clever, works hard, knows a lot) will not necessarily succeed, while Sully (dense, lazy and ignorant), will, because he’s a winner with a useful talent.