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Main Cast: John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Mary Gibbs, Steve Buscemi, James Coburn, Frank Oz, Jennifer Tilly, Jeff Pidgeon

We begin with a lengthy credit roll and some odd animation. Next we meet up with James P. ‘Sully’ Sullivan (John Goodman) and Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal). However, they’re at home right now and Mike is waking Sully up to workout. They watch a commercial in which features both of them, although Mike is given a split second of screen time. However, Mike’s an egotistical weirdo and goes crazy that he made it on TV. Sully is more of a humble monster throughout.

They walk to Monster's Inc., a power plant where they work and we get to see some more of the monster world. It seems that no monster looks the same. And since all the monsters fall in love with completely different monsters, it will stay that way. Case in point if Mike and a leggy, snake-haired receptionist named Celia Mae (Jennifer Tilly).

At Monster's Inc., Sully is the top kid scaring monster. His associate, Mike gets doors that open into kids' rooms. From the kids' point of view, it looks like a monster is coming out of their closet, rather than out of some monster world. Well, it seems that some enterprising monster somehow noticed that a child's scream generates power. How this was figured out is beyond me. What happened? Did this monster have some batteries in its pockets that got spontaneously recharged??? Did some monster think, “you know what? I bet sound waves would make a great power source. They bounce off walls and there has got to be a way to harness this natural, clean source of energy.” Yeah right. We will never know...and let's not even talk about how they figured out how to make an interdimensional portal from their world to ours.

Anyway, Mike is the monster that fetches doors for Sully. He swipes a key-card, a door comes a long, plugs into some kind of unit and gets powered up. Then Sully goes through the door to scare kids. The kids’ screams are stored in canisters and are what are used to power the city; hence, Monsters, Inc. is a utility company. And Sully is the top scarer, although he’s in heavy competition with Randall Boggs (Steve Buscemi), a shifty chameleon monster.

After their shift, Mike has to take Celia on a date and leave Sully to do Mike's paperwork. Sully goes back to the work floor and finds a door that shouldn't be there. He checks it to make sure some monster isn't on a job and releases a child from the place and here is where the funniness is supposed to ensue. Well, that was what was supposed to happen, but it didn’t. Most of the gags after this pivotal point in the movie, stink.

Sully goes to find Mike to get his help, with Boo (Mary Gibbs) the child in tow, and finds him at the Harry Hausen having dinner with Mike’s girl, Celia Mae. For those people that are b-movie maniacs, you'll take note and have a chuckle at that restaurant's name. Yes, it is in reference to that great modeler that did lots of stop-motion work on older movies, liked The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.

Chaos ensues because the kid escapes and wanders the restaurant. The duo recapture her and take her to their home. Why do they do this? Kids are supposed to be deadly to monsters! Why not just give her to the Child Detection Agency (CDA), a group of monsters in yellow body suits that act like the CIA? The CDA clobber other monsters when they get contaminated by children’s stuff. That’s what they’re there for, right? But no, we have two shmucks who think they know better, even though they are petrified of Boo.

Sully gets it into his head that they can return her to her room, so they put a disguise on her and take her to Monsters, Inc. in the morning. It’s crawling with the CDA, but they make it through the lobby. After a bunch of super stupid sequences, like Boo’s bathroom break, we finally get Randall tailing Mike. Why does he follow Mike? Because he's a suspicious creature...especially when it comes to walking eyeballs. I can't blame him. I think the real reason was that Mike mentioned something his date to Sully and that gave Randall a lead.

Mike gets captured by Randall when they try to return the kid. How? Well, Randall is blinder than a snail. Mike is jumping around in Boo’s bedroom and Randall runs in there and sticks Mike in a box, thinking Mike is Boo. Um, Boo is a little kid. Mike is a walking beach ball. Hello???

Anyway, Randall wants to torture children by sucking screams out of them. Which brings up another thing. How in the world would they discover that children’s screams would power anything? And why would laughing be better? And why are most of the monsters friendly looking instead of walking terrors??? No wonder the kids aren’t scared of them!

So, Sully must rescue his bud and he does so. Then they almost save Boo only to get captured by Henry J. Waternoose III (James Coburn) who is the CEO of Monsters, Inc. and in cahoots with Randall. Mike and Sully are banished to the Himalayas where they meet the abominable snowman.

Mike and Sully argue for a while as the snowman offers them snow cones. Finally, Sully just leaves and rides a piece of wood into a nearby town. 

Thus, they make it back and we have a chase scene where Sully and Mike run around fighting over Boo with Randall while all of them ride doors around Monsters, Inc. (This is a good sequence in that it was very imaginative.) Um, it's hard to imagine, but the monster actually perch on the top of doors or at least hang on to them as they move very swiftly along a high wire.

They make Boo laugh by hurting themselves and that somehow activates the doors…even though we’ve seen the power must be bottled/harnessed by some other means earlier in the movie. So, they can’t even follow their own faulty physics in this movie?! What is going on here?!?!

Finally the movie ends with all the bad guys getting arrested (except for Randall, who was thrown through a door that was promptly destroyed) and Sully ending up being the CEO. Oh, and we can’t forget him going to see his Boo one more time.

As an aside, there are also two short flicks on the video. One at the beginning with some birds and one at the end called “Mike’s Car” or something. The first one is about a bunch of snotty little birds that just chirp/squeek. Then they see a doofy looking large bird and the little ones all act haughty and stupid. The doofy bird lands in their mist and ends up getting knocked off the telephone wire they’re all on and that sends all the little birds flying. The last scene is with the doofy bird laughing at the now-naked little birds who have lost their feathers due to being flung. Kind of a funny little flick with a message to treat others as you’d want to be treated.

Unfortunately, “Mike’s Car” is not nearly as good. In fact, I highly recommend not taking the time to watch it. It is about Mike’s new car. His car looks stupid and the humor of this little short is watching Mike fall into the engine and hurting himself. He even gets trapped in there when the hood falls. This is an atrocity that makes this reviewer wonder how they could justify spending money on making it. It also makes me feel sorry for the lot that had to make it and for the idiots that waited through the interminably long credits to watch this awful cinema. Don’t be as foolish as this viewer was. Steer clear.

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Bad Stuff:

Dumb Stuff:

I liked the idea behind the movie. It has a lot of possibilities. Unfortunately, rather than taking a great idea and running with it, they took it and sent it through a blender leaving behind a mess.

Good for keeping your yapping kids quiet. And geeks will appreciate all the work that went into the CGI.