For anyone who has ever felt like they don’t belong, like they’re an outcast, or that they aren’t in the in crowd or that they don’t have that something special that others seem to have, or that they must be weird or an oddball and feel alone in a crowd – which pretty much describes me, which is why I loved this story.

The long awaited sequel to Monsters, Inc from 2001, brings back Billy Crystal and John Goodman in their roles as Mike and Sullivan, two lovable monsters seeking to be the best at scaring little children. This is an origin story about how they first met in college, that is Monsters University, and became the unlikely team that we saw in the original.

Though not as fresh as the original, and a little slow at the start, Pixar still does it right with this one by placing this story of identity, self-worth, individualism and team spirit into the fun environment of a university that gives degrees to monsters on scaring the real world.

We see that Mike has struggled all his life with simply not being scary. And yet that is all he wants to be. He is the typical nerd monster in grade school that everyone teases and laughs at. But he finds a way to make it into Monsters University, where he meets Sullivan, the monster with a pedigree of scariness, but a troublemaking slouch who doesn’t follow the rules, doesn’t try hard enough, and gets stuck with the Losers because of his irresponsibility.

So when they become roommates at the fraternity, OK (Oozma Kappa), which consists of nerds and outcasts, and an old guy going back to school, they begin in conflict because Sullivan sees they are all losers, but Mike believes if they try hard enough, they can all win the big Scare Contest of fraternities, and whoever wins, the entire frat or sorority gets to be included in the Scare Program, the elite degree that sends a lot of monsters to become quality scarers of children.

Needless to say, the nerds want to be accepted by the “in crowd,” who mocks them, Sullivan struggles with being a failure to live up to his family name by being with a bunch of losers, and Mike is the eternal optimist who believes that if everyone works hard enough, we can all achieve our dreams.

This is a wonderful story about appreciating the special value of each person as we discover that even the nerds and outcasts of the world have talents or special qualities that make them valuable people in the world. And it also deals with the issue of acceptance of those whom we deem “losers” because they can be among the most kind or giving people. But also, it is a journey for Sully who discovers quality people are more important than “cool people,” and he is just as frail with his own securities and fears as anyone else in the world. And Mike learns that you can’t always achieve what you want just by hard work, but you can apply your special skills in a way that achieves a special result anyway.

Both Mike and Sully learn that being a part of a team is more important than being a celebrity individual as they both fight to be the team leader (and therefore derail their success), until they learn to use their talents together. In fact, at the big climax, Mike, who seems to be cursed with the inability to EVER BE SCARY (the little monster is so lovable), finally learns to use his passionate book knowledge and study of scaring to help orchestrate Sully’s natural scaring skills to end up creating the biggest scare in the history of the University. Together, Mike uses his brains, and Sullivan his brawn to be the successful team they could not be alone.

So there is a lot of great heartwarming stuff about the value of being a team player and the selfishness of our individualistic “celebrity” culture mindset. The monsters don’t start “winning” until they embrace their specialness and utilize what talents they DO have as a team to accomplish their goal. And everyone has specialness, even the nerdiest nerds and the dorkiest dorks. And that is what results in success. But it doesn’t wrap up too easily or without some pain – just like real life.

SPOILER: One particularly poignant plot element is that Oozma Kappa does not win the tournament because of cheating by Sully, who wanted to help Mike. BUT, we see that they quit the school and work their way up at Monsters Inc. from the mailroom department to be the Scarers they are in Monsters Inc. This is a wonderful positive rejection of our bigoted “higher education” society that breeds the monstrous lie of the Enlightenment that Education is Salvation: Everyone needs a college education to make it in this world. But the fact is that entrepreneurs with passion who don’t fit in with that world of college (Like Bill Gates, AHEM) can achieve great things through their passionate pursuit and dedication to excellence and hard work.

For the Losers in all of us, this is a must see.

Not really recommended. This CGI animated story about a small town robot that wants to go to the big city and be a famous inventor was a good little cartoon with some good morals. The moral themes were pretty obvious here from the mouths of the characters: “Follow your dream, and never give up,” “a dream that you don’t fight for can haunt you the rest of your life,” and “You can shine, no matter what you’re made of” (The old tagline for the company of inventions that the hero wants to be a part of). These are simple but good inspirational morals about the value of each and every person, even the oddballs, as represented in this story by oddball robots that are made of spare parts. But it also contains a theme of comparing the modern greedy corporate exploitation of the consumer with the old school understanding of “see a need, fill a need.” As one of the robots says, “It used to be about making life better. Now, it’s about money.” The new head of the biggest company decides to abolish making spare parts for robots to fix themselves and to advertise “Why just be yourself, when you can be NEW!” or something like that. In other words, they are going to only make upgrades, and robots who can’t afford it become outmoded and are sent to the chop shop, where the villain’s evil mother destroys and burns up all such old robot pieces. She is the Hilary Clinton of the corporation. Now, this obviously has a Marxist bent to it with it’s reduction of people to poor robots being economically exploited by the rich, but it’s not all bad or entirely false. What made it so unmoving to me personally was the inherent inhumanity in robots. Even though they were anthropomorphized and even though the themes were very human, at the end of the day, these are ultimately contraptions of mechanical soullessness. I could not ultimately care for them because they are not soulish animals. No matter how much you “humanize” them, they simply aren’t alive. It’s one thing to anthropomorphize animals like Finding Nemo and Ice Age. But these are animals that have souls, living organisms that have that link with humans in their “breath of life.” But I’m sorry, robots just don’t draw my affection. They may work as comic relief, as in Star Wars, but not as a materialistic world of machines. This is another argument against Darwinism and the claim that consciousness is merely a higher order of complexity or organization of matter without transcendence. But why did Toy Story work then? I think because even though they were toys, they were toys of people (Buzz and Woody) as well as animals (Godzilla, etc.) So the few purely mechanical toys that were not of living things were clearly overshadowed by the toys of “living things.” I am not against anthropomorphism, I’m just saying that anthropomorphizing robots is not satisfying to me because the gap between lifeless robots and humans is too great to draw human affection, whereas the gap between humans and animals is not.

Highly Recommended. I won’t say it. I won’t say it was “incredible.” No. It was FANTASTIC. Pixar is the greatest animation studio since Disney started. In fact, they have become what Disney has failed to maintain, the animated family film studio. I absolutely loved the pro-family nature of this film. A family that bickers and is not being themselves, who have to draw together and use their special abilities to not only save the world, but save each other as well. Some tight-lipped prissies will say that the family was discordant and always bickering which did not support harmony in family. And these people do not know what they are talking about. Just cause a family bickers does not mean they are not harmonious on a deeper level. Anyone who claims that they do have a happy family that doesn’t bicker at all is not fooling anyone but themself. I have to admit this, that the scenes of the family drawing together to save each other, along with their friend, the freezer superhero, actually made me tear up because every act of drawing together and helping each other was an ACT of harmony and familial love that supported the ultimate bond that a family should have. I loved the kids. I loved how each of their super powers reflected their own character type or personality. The girl who can turn invisible and create force fields around herself is a shy girl who hides and protects herself from hurt. The speedy boy is an ADD kid. The stretch mom is a mom who stretches herself for everyone in her family, and the super dad is a testosterone fiend looking for excitement. I loved it. The theme of “the hero in all of us” or the “special value of each person” was very beautiful. And even the sociocultural picture of our society was profound. In the story, people start sueing super heros for saving them when they didn’t want to be saved or the collateral damage that occurs in the midst of the saving. Sound familiar? This gets to the point that all superheros can no longer afford the legal cost of saving people so they stop it and become “normal.” Well, how real is this? THIS IS AMERICA. We have a society where criminals sue their victims and win, where single selfish individuals win outrageous lawsuits that hurt medical or scientific industries. Law suits have become a new form of legitimized crime. We are a litigious society that blames everyone else for our own sins and wants everyone else to pay for it. We have a society of mediocrity where employees who seek excellence are castigated by the rest of the employees because excellence makes their mediocrity look bad. I know, I’ve seen this myself. Consequently good people who would help society are hindered in doing so because of the selfish mediocrity and jealousy of others. This entitlement mentality and blameshifting culture is destroying goodness and righteousness in our country. The Incredibles makes all good fun of this fault, but it leaves you with a profound revelation as well. This entitlement and blameshifting is squelching the “super heros” around us. The Incredibles brings back goodness and excellence and roots it in the family like no movie I’ve seen I a long time.

Recommended, but beware of subversion. I love CGI animation. I love how expressive and cute the animated characters can be, how they represent human emotions and gestures with such similitude. I enjoy the simple storylines, easy to follow, strong on moral content. Shark Tale is one of these. Unfortunately, it’s a mixed bag of good values and subversive ones. Oscar is the little slacker fish at a Whale Wash who has big dreams of being loved by being somebody important up on the “top of the reef.” When he falsely gets the credit for slaying a shark, he goes with it in order to achieve that fame he wants so badly. Meanwhile, Lenny, the shark, is dying to get out of his shark family because he is a vegetarian and doesn’t want to rule the waters through fear and a carnivorous appetite. The shark world is portrayed rather ingeniously as a fish eat fish mafia family. Only the strong… Very clever and provides a whole new context for the genre. Loved that. Oscar and Lenny team up to help each other and everyone learns their lesson by the end. What I really liked about this film is the theme about the emptiness at the “top” of celebrity worship. Oscar’s character flaw is that he thinks he needs to be “somebody” famous and important to be loved, that he has to “be somebody,” because “nobody loves a nobody,” But what he doesn’t bargain for is that the “people” of that world of celebrity, as embodied in Lola, the sexy fickle female fish who uses him for her own benefit, are vacuous and without real substance or permanence in their character. Oscar comes to realize that the real ones who love him all along have been right in front of him, as embodied in the lovable small town fish girl Angie, who sticks with him through thick and thin. As she finally screams to him, “I loved you when you were a nobody! I loved you before the Lie!” Interesting that “the Lie” here is the alleged killing of the shark, but it really expresses a wider theme that the entire celebrity culture is itself a Lie. I was clearly reminded of It’s a Wonderful Life with George Bailey wanting to “wipe the dust off my feet of this crummy little town and see the world.” Build skyscrapers and such. It’s all great Americana values here and I love that. The simple morality of middle American values are captured in Angie’s straightforward command when she discovers the lie: To Oscar, “you tell the truth,” and to Lenny, “and you go home.” Of course, they don’t at the beginning and that’s what gets them into trouble. Oscar finally realizes, “I didn’t need to go to the top of the reef. Everything I needed was right in front of me the whole time.” The love of a good woman, and friends. Now, I guess a Marxist could criticize this as a conspiracy of slave class reinforcement, considering that the movie also repackages the whole “Car Wash” context for the poor black culture as happy slavery. You know, don’t aspire to greatness, just accept your position in life at the bottom of the food chain, and enjoy it doing what you are best at, slave jobs at slave wages. But I think that is too simplistic. I think the point of this is more like The Wizard of Oz, and Wonderful Life, to see the value of home and those who truly do love you, and the shallowness, indeed falsity, of public love for celebrity. And that is an interesting irony undergirding this moral story. Here you have all these celebrity actors and actresses, like Will Smith, Angelina Jolie, Robert DeNiro, Jack Black and others who are starring in a story about how empty and worthless their own celebrity existence is. They are the fish on the “top of the reef” telling us it is a miserable lonely life up there. Do they even realize their own stories condemn them? Now, here is what I did not like about the movie: Lenny the shark is clearly an analogy for a homosexual and so his mafia family’s rejection of him is an analogy for the claim that traditional society is being intolerant of homosexuals. Lenny is fey and sensitive like a homosexual cliché out of Will and Grace, and likes to dress up “like a dolphin,” which is an obvious insult to sharks, like “dressing up like a woman” is to men. And the way he dresses is obviously a queer eye guy with his yellow scarf around his neck. He regurgitates familiar gay phrases, like, “I’m not like other sharks,” “My family doesn’t accept me,” and “I like to dress like a dolphin, so what?” At the end this “dressing up” thing becomes more pronounced when the head shark, Lenny’s father, finally does accept him “no matter what you eat or how you dress.” And then they show other sharks being “liberated” from their mean stodgey “sharkness” by dressing up in what can only be considered Mardi Gras Gay Pride costumes. This theme of “accepting” people with abnormal behaviors or abnormal “tastes” is a very common one in movies, and an obvious subversive one driven by those with an anti-Christian agenda. And I might also add, a rather hypocritical one as well. I think it’s time Hollywood should start practicing what it preaches and put aside its own prejudice and bigotry. I think Hollywood should start expressing tolerance toward Christians and traditional moral valued people, who are truly the hated outcast rejected oppressed victims in LaLa Land.