This prequel to 2001's hit animation makes for a pleasant and undemanding watch. There is precious little drama, even for a child-friendly feature, but rolls along at a gentle pace, with some nifty set pieces, a well managed plot and the expected top-notch Pixar animation.
What the film lacks in excitement it makes up for in cheeky charm. Those who enjoyed Sulley, the big fluffy monster (voiced by John Goodman), and Mike (Billy Crystal), the round one-eyed one, in the original will certainly find this new outing a lot of fun.
The story takes viewers back to a time before the creatures were practising monsters, and shows how they became so scary. Like any educational institution, Monsters University, which is a bit like Hogwarts, has popular kids and outcasts. But in this case, the popular kids are the ones who know how to be terrifying while the outcasts are those who don't seem to be able to make a sleepy child scream in terror.
The aim of all the student monsters is to secure a place on the special "scare programme", an elite class in "monstering" that is the pet project of the bug-like university dean, Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren). Mike desperately wants to learn how to scare people, and studies the art of monstering - but he is not a natural.
Sullivan (aka Sulley), meanwhile, comes from a respected family of terrifying monsters. Frightening kids is so easy for him that he doesn't bother to try. But finding themselves kicked off the scare programme, the two of them team up to win a scare competition and get themselves reinstated.
