Monsters University – first look review

There are Pixar films you mess with and Pixar films you don't. Re-fit Cars as much as you like, leave Ratatouille alone. Before Monsters University, I'd have classed Monsters, Inc – the 2001 adventure about a pair of bogeymen employed by a corporation to scare up energy from human kids' screams – as untouchable. Yet this prequel is just faithful enough, just funny enough to leave it lurking in the twilight in-between.

It's years before James P "Sulley" Sullivan and Michael "Mike" Wazowski (Billy Crystal) will join Monsters Inc. The fresh-faced pair have enrolled at Monsters University to learn the secret to scaring the bejesus out of scream-stuffed kiddywinks. Sully (John Goodman) – big, hairy, naturally terrifying – is a lazy jock. Mike – small, rotund, cute for a cyclops – is a nerdlinger. He's a book-born scarer who knows his Zombie Scares from Werewolf Growls, but he'll struggle come exam time. If scaring is something you're born into, Mike came up short.

Unsurprisingly young Mike and Sulley can't stand each other. Each has what the other lacks. After months of griping, their animosity comes to full-throated roar at the end of term examination. They upset the imperious Dean Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren) and are thrown off the scarer programme. Their one chance of a reprieve is an annual team-scaring competition. But to win, they'll need to work together.

Monsters University's themes – ambition, persistence, friendship and teamwork – ran through the Pixar films released during the studio's remarkable purple patch. What it lacks is a human element – literally. Monsters Inc took a wonderful scenario and embedded it in our everyday through its regular trips into the real world. The relationship between Sully and Boo, the human child who teaches him to reassess his talent, grounded its weirdness in an emotional story. The best Pixar films do this – they offer a take on the real world that is skewed only lightly, so the most ordinary places – the toy box, the kitchen, the fish bowl – become ripe for adventure. Monsters University, like Cars, Cars 2 and Brave before it, suffers from existing in a world that's too far removed from the jeopardy of our own world.

Mike and Sulley's university years would seem an odd choice for a film aimed at kids who'll have trouble pronouncing the title. A frat party descends into a riot of PG hedonism, with monsters chugging pails of garbage and scrapping playfully in a pile of fur, horns and tenticles – the sweetest, safest, sort-of orgy. This is where the merging of real and fantasy works – in a cutesy spin on frat comedy that allows age-appropriate riffing on the Hollywood version of university life, even if the majority of these quick laughs will sail over younger viewers's heads.

Still, the odd knowing chuckle isn't enough to sustain MU's run. Aside from Mike and Sulley (who Crystal and Goodman voice with evident love), there's no character that stands out. Mirren is good as the bat-winged, beatle-legged Dean Hardscrabble, but there's no depth to her haughtiness, no passion past her anger. Similarly the members of Mike and Sulley's Oozma Kappa fraternity saunter up as an assortment of make-a-monster attributes that could be shaken up and re-dealt and barely cause a blip.

The huge box-office success of the Toy Story sequels must have factored into Disney-Pixar's decision to develop Monsters into a franchise. But, while Toy Story 2 and 3 developed the characters and expanded the scope, Monsters University looks backward in every sense. Pixar's emphasis on character and story made (and could make again) worlds that we fell in love with. Monsters University – a fun, disposable watch – has taken one of these worlds and repeated it to formula. It leaves the studio looking nostalgic. Aching for the days when they made some of the best films – animated or otherwise – out there.