It's clever, it's exotic,
it's Disney
By Jonathan Romney
11 February 2002
In J K Huysmans'
novel Against Nature, the bible of
the 1880s French Decadents, the world-weary hero Des Esseintes
devotes himself to the cult of all that is artificial,
unnatural and perverse in creation. He
has a special fondness for plants that don't look like plants,
but imitate the appearance of stone, paper, silk, rotting
flesh. A hundred and forty years on, cinema
has produced a work that would drive Des
Esseintes wild, a film rich in tactile and wholly artificial surfaces, a
very sampler of exotic textures for the sated aesthete.
Who would ever have expected that from Walt Disney?
Monsters, Inc. is
Disney's latest digital animation release
made by Pixar, creators of the Toy Story
films. It pretty much contains something to please everyone – witty
script, ingenious narrative, the odd discreetly
tear-jerking moment, a toe-tapping Randy Newman song, not to mention the
now-customary closing montage of cod out-takes. It
will delight kids of all ages, as they say. But not nearly as much
as it will tickle our nostril-flaring
hyper-aesthete, who seems to be the film's true target viewer.
Monsters, Inc.
has an almost tangible sense of
texture, especially if you manage to
see it in a nice vivid digital projection. Toy Story and
its sequel were already big on texture, in their exploration of the sheen
of different plastics, but this one goes even further. It's especially
strong on those organic materials that computer imagery has traditionally
found nigh-on impossible to get right. The film's great achievement
is the creation of James P Sullivan, aka Sulley, voiced by John Goodman
– an eight-foot horned behemoth covered in thick turquoise
and purple fur. There are supposedly some
three million individual hairs in this miraculous pelt, and talk
about sensuous – you want to reach out and touch it as it ripples and
shudders and resists the onslaught of snow in a blizzard. It
is at once absolutely real-looking and entirely artificial – less like
animal hair than a forest of hand-crafted fibre-optic strands.
I could go on waxing
fetishistic about the film's rhapsody of textures: about
the rough crustacean shell of Sulley's crab-like boss (James Coburn);
about the tinier tactile details like the minutely-observed rubbery folds
at the corners of characters' mouths; or about the yellow-suited
SWAT-style troopers seemingly modelled in Plasticine, surely a
homage to the Aardman school.
But you'll want to know
about the story eventually, and that's pretty ingenious too. The city of
Monstropolis is fuelled by the screams of children from our
world, collected by the expert scarers of Monsters, Inc., who
pop out at night from behind cupboard doors which double
as inter-dimensional portals. Chief scarer is Sulley,
and his trusty sidekick is Mike
Wazowski (Billy Crystal), a wisecracking one-eyed pea on
legs (one of the film's best gags is that its gruesome
apparitions all have ordinary working-stiff
names like Peterson, Sanderson, Jones, Rivera).
The film's basic conceit
reworks the standard Munsters inversion by which
monstrous things seem ordinary and everyday things
become unspeakably vile. A small, curious child, a little girl named
Boo, accidentally wanders into Monstropolis, and while we see
her as a button-cute moppet,to our heroes she's a
Godzilla-like abomination. "That thing is a
killing machine!" shrieks Wazowski as Boo runs riot, her
gurgling giggles causing power surges that
immobilise the entire city.
It doesn't really matter
that Monsters, Inc. is narratively a bit derivative. So
what if the indestructible baby-in-peril gags are straight out of
Roger Rabbit, if Boo and Sulley have a sort of innocent King
Kong/Fay Wray relationship going, and if Sulley and Wazowski
themselves (a perfect vocal match of Goodman's bear-like basso and
Crystal's kvetch-a-second gibber) are really Fred Flintstone and Barney
Rubble, blue-collar heroes right down to
their lunch pails? All that simply makes the film richer in subtext. The
Monsters, Inc. plant (motto: "We Scare Because We Care") could
be Hollywood itself, a Fordian assembly line for chills and thrills; but
ultimately, the film defends the hands-on methods of the expert
charismatic scarer over the mass-production method devised by serpentine,
purple-scaled villain Randall (Steve Buscemi providing the sneers and
hisses). If you like, the film is an
argument for Pixar's artisanal approach, an apologia for
the painstaking de luxe method that Monsters, Inc. amply
vindicates.
Central to the film's
appeal is the way that the human child Boo – needless to say, the least
lifelike figure in the film – is voiced by a real-life three-year-old,
Mary Gibbs, whose artless babble gives the film a bizarre organic touch
that nicely offsets the surrounding artifice and alien quality. Monsters,
Inc. may be patchy on characterisation compared to Toy Story, but
what matters is the pacing and the constant invention.
For proof that the people at Pixar think
bigger and crazier than just about anyone in Hollywood is
provided by the action finale, which involves millions
of doors (some 5.7 million, apparently) circulating in mid-air
on a labyrinthine system of overhead rails
– a routine that takes the idea of theme-ride cinema to a sublimely
ambitious extreme.
Even after two Toy Story
films, some might still be tempted to write off this
kind of digital entertainment as simply flashy fun for kids, yet there's
so much invention here – on every level, from
slam-bang routines to little in-jokes buried away
in the design – that it gives you a sense of cinema rediscovering
its ingenuity and its nerve endings again.
Monsters, Inc. somehow feels a much purer, more joyous
display of computer-generated image trickery than the knowingly
"adult", self-referential Shrek. This is state-of-the-art
children's cinema, for sure. But it's also the latest pioneering
research-and-development experiment on cinematic
perception, as well as a
transcendently elegant experience for the decadent
sensualist in you. There's something
here to reawaken the most jaded optical tastebuds.
j.romney@independent.co.uk |