Ten years ago this week, Pixar released Monsters University. The prequel to 2001 classic Monsters Inc., it followed Mike and Sulley as they attended MU, and grew from rivals into close friends. Over the years, Monsters University has found itself in the bottom half of Pixar’s filmography, standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Onward, The Good Dinosaur, and, by the look of things, Elemental.
I won’t argue that Monsters University is some hidden gem and everyone who couldn’t look past its wonky pacing and inconsistent supporting cast is a fool, ten years on it’s still one of the most important films to me. For all its flaws, the impact Monsters University has had on me is immense.
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When Monsters University first released in 2013, I was just about to start university myself. It’s meant to be one of the most exciting times in your life, as you start exploring your independence for the first time, making new friends, and trying new things. From Fresher parties to pub crawls and societies, the ‘University experience’ is often peddled as more important than the things you learn on your actual course.
That’s not how it went for me. I had the best intentions, but by the end of the first week I was already considering dropping out. The course was fine and I wasn’t struggling academically, but I was overwhelmed, lonely, and feeling like an absolute failure when it came to the other side of Uni – the bit people regularly say is the ‘best time of your life’. Enter Monsters University.
When people are stressed, they often fall back on nostalgia for comfort. For me, it was Disney. When I wasn’t studying, I was watching the entire Disney back catalogue. While that had the awful side-effect of turning me into a major Disney Adult to this day, eventually I worked my way through to Monsters University. Though the idea of watching a movie about the very thing that was the biggest problem in my life seems odd, it immediately became a comfort.
Monsters University plays up the big American College Movie tropes – there are fraternities and sororities, Rush weeks, midterm finals, sports teams, cheerleaders, beer pong, and wild parties. It shows it all, and it became something of a surrogate ‘student experience’ for me.
I fell back on MU’s picturesque idea of what University should be. Mike Wazowksi also wasn’t a party animal and struggled to fit in, and he got what I considered to be the ‘ideal’ experience – it wasn’t that I just sucked at being a student and needed to put myself out there more, it was that my university wasn’t Monsters University. Was it a healthy coping mechanism? Absolutely not, but it was the life ring that got me through my first year nonetheless.
Simple escapism is just part of the story, though. If it was that simple, I wouldn’t have a larger-than-I-care-to-mention Sulley memorabilia collection almost seven years after graduating. For all its pretty college campuses and colourful rush week scenes, Monsters University has one of the most realistic, yet comforting core messages of any Pixar movie: failure is inevitable.
It sounds pessimistic, but Monster University constantly shows people failing. Mike fails to become a scarer, and Sulley fails to live up to his family’s name, and both wind up expelled from Monsters University with their dreams unfulfilled. Randall fails to fit in with Roar Omega Roar, and even Dean Hardscrabble fails as a teacher as the most promising scarers in her school’s history go unnoticed until she has to expel them. Failure is inevitable, but it also serves as the foundation for these characters to grow.
We see it most with Mike and Sulley, of course. Sulley finds confidence in his own skills, free from the expectations of his family. By the time of Monsters Inc., he’s still the world-class scarer his family wanted him to be, but he’s humbler and more likeable. Mike never manages to become a scarer, but he becomes a top-tier scarer’s assistant, and even eventually helps run the entire Monsters Inc. company.
You could even argue it being a prequel to Monsters Inc. inherently makes it about failure, too. The whole society of Monsters University reveres scarers, only for Monsters Inc. to make scaring redundant with the discovery that laughter is a much better source of power than scream. It isn’t just characters who fail and grow – across the series, the entire monster society has to admit failure and move on to new, better things.
By the start of my second year of university, the escapism Monsters University provided had worn off, and I was pretty committed to just dropping out entirely. Everyone else had settled into the routine of student life, and I still felt like I was drowning. I was on my dream course, I was getting decent grades, but I was still totally miserable. I realised that I wasn’t failing at being a student, I had failed. Past tense. And, just like Mike and Sulley, the only thing I could do now was try something different.
My countless rewatches of Monsters University had drilled into me that Mike and Sulley were happy after their failure, and I could be too if I just embraced it. Instead of dropping out, I just started again. I changed my course from my dream one to one I hadn’t ever considered and started my first year for the second time. While I never really got the hang of being a student, I’d crashed out of the whole concept of the ‘student experience’ and was free to just enjoy the course on my own terms, with none of the expectation and peer pressure that had weighed me down the first time.
Over the years, my rewatches of Monsters University became less and less frequent. I don’t ‘need’ to watch it the same way I used to when I was at my lowest. Sulley has remained my comfort character, though. As cringey as it may seem for a 29-year-old guy to say, looking at my Sulley merch collection makes me feel happy and calm, and I don’t think that is something I’ll ever outgrow.
Monsters University is an alright movie. It’s not one most people have likely thought much about in the past decade, but it isn’t an outright stinker either. But, for me, its message of not being afraid to fail makes it a movie worth taking a moment to appreciate all these years later.
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