Monsters, Inc.
Dir.: Peter Docter, David Silverman and Lee Unkrich
G, 90 min.
Now playing at area theaters
It’s not terribly hard to make a children’s movie that appeals to adults. Most kid-friendly productions just dump a bucket of pop culture references into the script, mix in a bit of barely-over-the-tykes’-heads scatology, and top the concoction with a healthy dollop of self-referential winking, to make it clear that we’re all really above the simplistic manipulations of a children’s movie. There’s a place for this sort of savvy, cynical entertainment, but a decade of arch Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network originals has made attitude-laden animation so easy to come by that the effect is no longer all that effective. Edge ain’t what it used to be.
Thank God for Pixar Animation Studios, whose fourth feature film Monsters, Inc. shows that it’s possible to make a movie that appeals to children and adults without falling into the same old formula. Almost as tightly plotted as the Toy Story movies or A Bug’s Life, with the same winning combination of witty sight gags, character-derived comedy and thrilling action sequences, Monsters, Inc. offers nothing less than classic whiz-bang Hollywood movie magic, with brightly colored computer-animated monsters standing in for Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. That’s what Pixar does: It gets the story right, then it gets the feeling and then it worries about making the movie look good.
The Monsters, Inc. of the title is a power plant for the city of Monstropolis, whose energy is generated by the screams of little children, collected by the monsters who lurk in their closets. The title of top scarer at Monsters, Inc. belongs to a furry, rainbow-hued Goliath named James P. Sullivan (voiced by John Goodman), who is ably assisted by Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal), a one-eyed, wide-eyed chum with skin like a Granny Smith apple. One of the good jokes of the movie is that the monsters all have bland, regular-guy names—even Sullivan’s sneaky rival Randall Boggs (Steve Buscemi), who sets the story in motion when he leaves a closet door at his work station unattended, allowing a human child to slip through to Monstropolis, where children are considered toxic.
Sullivan and Wazowski are the first to encounter the little girl—a mischievous toddler whom Sullivan dubs “Boo” after her most common utterance—and they scurry about trying to get her back through her closet door without being cornered by the Child Detection Agency or by Boggs, who has a plan to up his scream production by kidnapping children and strapping them to a scream-extraction machine. There may be a message in Monsters, Inc. about the need for energy conservation and benevolent corporations, but if so the message is subtle and intrinsic to the material. A more overt theme concerns the interactions of adults and children, as Sullivan grows attached to Boo and tries to keep her safe from the benign but seemingly scary inhabitants of Monstropolis—a world that, somewhat pointedly, resembles our own.
There are sure to be some restless critics who will pick at Monsters, Inc., and complain that the Pixar style is no longer novel and that the film is soft and slight and nowhere near as bold as the ironic-to-a-fault Shrek. It’s true that the plot of Monsters, Inc. suffers from some repetition, and that the film is less immediately special than Pixar’s last masterpiece, Toy Story 2. But it would be shamefully wasteful to cast too many aspersions on a movie as purely pleasurable as this one, or indeed any movie with a finale as awe-inspiring and giddy as Monsters, Inc.’s ultimate door gag. This is what most people go to the movies for—laughs, excitement and heart.
But there’s something else that makes Pixar’s films resonant for adults. It’s not that they allow grown-ups to get back in touch with their childhood, though they’ve always had an element of that. And it’s not that they romanticize the glories of youth, though they’ve never shied away from sentimentality. It’s more that Pixar looks at the process of growing up with the clear-eyed understanding that leaving behind innocence is painful but necessary, and that one of the joys of maturity is being able to appreciate the unspoiled happiness of childhood without envying it. That’s what the melt-in-your-seat, touching final shot of Monsters, Inc. is all about—looking back through the portal to see how the next generation is doing, and smiling at what you see.
—Noel Murray
String-puller
Over the course of the ’90s, Iranian and Taiwanese cinema gradually rose from placement in obscure festivals to acclaim and release in American arthouses. While distributors took longer to recognize Taiwanese cinema, it eventually happened. WinStar even achieved a modicum of commercial success when it took a chance on organizing a traveling Hou Hsaio-hsien retrospective and on releasing Edward Yang’s Yi Yi. However, that Hou retrospective never made it to Nashville. The Puppetmaster (1993), which screens Nov. 11 and 13-14 at Sarratt Cinema, is only the second of his films to play here, following his 1998 breakthrough The Flowers of Shanghai, which finally seemed to build critical acclaim into an audience.
To be fair, not all of this obscurity is due to American isolationism: Hou’s sales agents have reportedly asked an unreasonable sum for the rights to his films until recently. Additionally, the other two films sandwiching The Puppetmaster in the “Three Tragedies” trilogy—City of Sadness (1989) and Good Men, Good Women (1995)—require some knowledge of Taiwanese history. The best of these three films, The Puppetmaster is also the most accessible. Centered around a real man, puppet theater performer Li Tien-lu (played by himself and three different actors), it combines documentary and fiction, telling about 40 years of Taiwanese history through his life story.
Hou’s style is instantly recognizable. In The Flowers of Shanghai, he created an intense claustrophobia by eschewing exteriors, using very long takes and panning very slowly from left to right during every scene. The Puppetmaster avoids close-ups—if any occur, it’s usually because an actor has walked toward the camera—and camera movement. For audiences used to Western conventions of framing and storytelling, many of his decisions are likely to seem perverse: Important events take place offscreen, related only by Li’s voice-over. To get much out of the film, one has to abandon the desire to understand every image instantly.
For instance, we get to see a shot of his mother praying before a makeshift altar. Li then explains its significance: She’s praying for his grandmother to get better. She did, but his mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis and died shortly thereafter. All of these emotionally charged events are related quickly and through Li’s commentary, rather than through images.
A bit of background helps put Li’s story in context. From 1895 to the end of World War II, Taiwan was a Japanese colony. This is roughly the period covered by The Puppetmaster, while City of Sadness focuses on the ’40s and Good Men, Good Women centers around a present-day actress making a film about Taiwanese Communists. As with many mainland Chinese films made over the past 15 years, Hou’s trilogy is suffused with a charge that comes from exploring subjects previously held off-limits. (Taiwan only became a democracy in 1987.) Despite its extremely dense structure, City of Sadness proved to be a surprise hit in Taiwan, largely for this reason.
The Puppetmaster combines three “tenses”: the past (fictional depictions of Li’s life), present (his current reflections on that life) and colorful views of his work as a puppetmaster. Without the last of these, the film might be unbearably distanced, but these scenes serve effectively as sensual counterpoint. Even with them, Li’s home life often feels as suffocating as the no-exit brothel of The Flowers of Shanghai. Hou’s deep-focus compositions are micromanaged to the point where decor threatens to crowd out the characters. The film’s documentary element is enhanced by Li’s onscreen appearances to talk about key events. For instance, a scene of his wife crying, followed by a shot of him hammering in a courtyard, is explained in retrospect as a response to their youngest son’s death.
If the story and images of The Puppetmaster move along in an odd meter, dotted with ellipses, this unusual nature couldn’t be more fitting for a nation whose identity crisis continues to this day, when indigenous Taiwanese are questioning the government’s insistence that Taiwan is the true Chinese republic. (Hou was the first Taiwanese filmmaker to incorporate the island’s native language, a Chinese dialect that’s quite different from the official Mandarin language, into his work.) In the wake of all the acclaim Hou’s films have recently received, it’s tempting to gloss over their strangeness.
That doesn’t do them any favors. The Puppetmaster is a rewarding film, but one that requires a great deal of work. Even so, it’s a good introduction to Hou’s world, especially since its Nashville run coincides with the release of several of his films, including Good Men, Good Women and the highly unconventional 1996 gangster film Goodbye South, Goodbye, on VHS and DVD. (They become far more accessible with repeat viewings, although the director’s style isn’t exactly video-friendly.) There’s something inspiring about Hou’s devotion to digging up his nation’s history, redeeming the cliché that the personal is political. It’s a shame that his American counterparts rarely offer anything of his caliber when they turn to our country’s history.
—Steve Erickson
