Cute, kid-friendly monster movie; may scare sensitive kids.
Parents Need to Know
Why Age 5+?
Any Positive Content?
Products & Purchases
some
This movie is part of the Disney-Pixar dynasty, with plenty of merchandise associated with the film. Toy Story toys are on the floor in one child's room.
Violence & Scariness
a little
Comic peril, cartoon violence. The monsters are terrified of children for most of the film, which takes out some of the scariness. In the scariest climactic scene, the villain monster straps a toddler to a chair to catch her screams in a machine, and she appears very frightened. Her monster friend saves her.
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Strong messages about the value of friendship and that facing your fears is a positive thing. Also, you can do the right thing and still succeed. Themes include courage, compassion, and integrity.
Positive Role Models
a lot
Mike and Sully are loyal friends. A monster learns to make kids laugh instead of scare them. Monsters try to do the right thing and protect a little girl. A powerful figure turns out to be a bad guy, but he pays for his poor choices.
Educational Value
very little
More for entertainment than education, though kids might learn a bit about factory work and how adults deal with hazards, like potential contamination (in this case, by children).
Parents Need to Know
Parents need to know that Monsters, Inc. is about closet monsters, but from their point of view -- scaring kids is their 9-to-5 job. Kids might be scared of the movie's concept initially, but they'll soon figure out that the monster Sulley is a softy who takes care of the little girl in the story who isn't the least bit afraid of him. However there's one scene where a monster the child does fear straps her to a chair and tries to steal her screams. Kids will find it funny that most monsters fear any contact with kids -- when one monster gets a child's sock on him the whole factory panics and biohazard workers quarantine and shave him. Young kids may need help understanding what the monsters in yellow suits are doing to him and why. Note: The 3-D version amps up the intensity. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails.
The best computer animated film of them all, and the most adult
Until now I couldn't bring myself to believe that computer animation was the equal of either stop motion animation or hand-drawn animation. All computer animated films looked a little (usually more than a little) too sterile, many were animated poorly ("Antz", "Shrek", "Final Fantasy"), and even the single unqualified success ("Toy Story 2") provided little evidence that a computer animated film COULD reach the heights other kinds of animation could. "Toy Story 2" had flawless character animation, but nothing as inspired as the best in "Tarzan" (released the same year, although I could have chosen almost any other Disney cartoon to make my point); effective art direction, but nothing to match "Fantasia" or "The Nightmare Before Christmas". And I thought that "Toy Story 2" was as good as the art was ever going to get.
I was wrong. This is far better. And what's more, there's no sense whatever that the script (an unusually rich and uninhibited script) is bumping up against the limits of what the medium will allow. It's now been proven that computer animation CAN be just as good as any other kind. Whether it will be allowed to be in future is another question, but for now, I'm hopeful. What we have here is computer animation's first ENTIRELY unalloyed artistic delight, with every character gracefully and characteristically animated, every virtual set just right and pleasing to look at, and an eye-tickling mastery of colour, light and shade that I thought would forever elude CGI artists.
It's not fair to judge anything good as "Monsters, Inc." as though it were a children's movie, but I can't resist comparing it with "Shrek" - which emphatically IS a children's movie. "Monsters, inc." is admittedly ABOUT children, in a sort of a way. The inhabitants of Monstropolis rely on children's screams for their energy, and the central story is kicked off when one of the monsters accidentally brings a small child (which he calls "Boo") into the city. But we never see things from her point of view. We see things from the point of view of the monsters, who are all adults - and who, like most adults, see children as frightening, almost incomprehensible members of another species. And they ARE. To be sure, Wazowski comes to feel strong affection for Boo, but she never becomes more than a humanoid pet (which is not to demean the relationship). This is a story about adults looking at childhood from the outside.
"Shrek", of course, is a children's movie through and through. Its attention span is short, it has an unthinking mean streak, and children will have a whale of a time watching the central characters (the bigger they are, the more fun it is) act childishly and make poo-poo jokes. "Monsters, Inc." has too much genuine wit, characters too rich, a world with too much depth, and a story at once too coherent and too complicated, to be PRIMARILY a film for children. This is not to say children won't like it. Maybe they will. (Who can say?) Here's the bonus: if they DO like it, it will (unlike "Shrek") actually have a beneficial effect. It will make them less frightened of the dark.
They're really mean to each other and elude to death a lot. And I'm not a feminist but it's really ridiculous all the scarers are male and the secretaries are female.
What's the Story?
The monsters in MONSTERS, INC. are more afraid of kids than kids are of monsters. But monsters need to collect kids' screams to fuel their world, and children are getting so hard to scare that the monsters' world is suffering from rolling blackouts. Top scarer John "Sulley" Sullivan (voiced by John Goodman) and rival Randall Boggs (Steve Buscemi) work as hard as they can to break the scream-collection record. But when Randall inadvertently lets a human child into the monster world, the monsters find out what being scared is really like.
This movie has the same delicious mixture of heart, humor, and technical wizardry that made A Bug's Life and the two Toy Story movies into instant classics. It's utterly delightful. It should be put in the dictionary to illustrate the word "adorable." Like Jim Henson, who decided to make his Sesame Street characters monsters so that kids would never be afraid of monsters again, the people behind Monsters, Inc. have created monsters that even the shyest child will find completely unscary. In fact, kids may decide that multiple heads, removable eyes, and hair made from snakes are kind of cute.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about what Sulley learns about kids and how he changes the factory for the better in the end of Monsters, Inc.
They can also talk about how each kid was scared by a certain kind of monster. Why was Boo scared of Randall and not Sulley? Why was Sulley considered such a top-notch scarer then?
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Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.