Monsters Inc

Pixar makes the best animated movies for kids. Beyond staying with you as beautiful memories, they do something really amazing that I’ve only started appreciating now: they aren’t “safe.” In the sense that their endings usually have something bittersweet about them instead of being purely happy endings. Also, every Pixar movie leaves you thinking about something, which is probably easier to notice when you rewatch them as an adult. The other day I rewatched one of my favorite childhood movies, Monsters, Inc., and I realized a few really interesting things.

Let’s think about what the protagonist’s job actually is: he enters the bedrooms of small children and scares them in the middle of the night. If you imagine that happening in real life, it’s extremely cruel and traumatic. But none of us think about it that way. Right from the start, the movie presents Sully as this lovable furry giant and Mike Wazowski as his funny best friend. Even the whole idea of monsters going in and out of doors to scare children is treated like a fun little montage, and you never stop to think about how horrifying what they’re doing actually is. And even if the concept had stayed that way until the end, nobody would’ve started writing think pieces accusing the movie of normalizing child abuse, simply because it’s a children’s movie. And yet, the movie itself refuses to let that issue slide. And it does it through one very specific scene: the moment when Sully demonstrates his scaring skills in the simulation room and accidentally terrifies Boo.

When I first saw that scene as a kid, I thought, “Aw, poor little Boo, Sully scared her by accident.” But the scene isn’t really about Boo. For the first time, we actually see what the scarers’ job looks like from the children’s point of view. Up until then, we had never really seen the kids’ POV in this system. Sure, we had seen Boo unable to sleep because she was afraid Randall would come out of the closet. But Randall had already been framed in our minds as the villain of the movie. And if the film had only focused on Boo being afraid of Randall, then he would’ve just been another cartoonish bad guy. But in the scene where Boo gets scared, it’s Sully making the roar. The hero of the story. The lovable teddy bear we’ve been following the entire movie. He tries to comfort Boo by telling her what he did wasn’t real. But when he sees the terror on her face, he can’t say it. Because yes, technically it was fake since it was only a demonstration. But when he entered children’s rooms for work, he did the exact same thing for real, with passion. And he was the best at it.

Since I mentioned Randall, the movie also does something very clever with his character: it creates a misleading villain arc. Randall wants to introduce a company policy where they kidnap children and extract their screams using the scream extractor machine. So naturally, we assume that this will be the main evil of the story and that our heroes will try to stop it. But if the movie had stopped there, it would basically have promoted the logic of “the lesser evil,” as if to say, “Well, frightening children in their bedrooms is better than kidnapping them.” But the movie doesn’t stop there. The heroes don’t just fight the extreme version of evil. They challenge the entire system itself, and by the end, laughter becomes the new energy source.

It’s also interesting how the media in Monstropolis portrays children: supposedly, kids aren’t as scared as they used to be anymore, and that has caused the energy crisis. Which is probably a lie, considering we literally hear children screaming behind the doors and see Boo terrified in the simulation room. It’s just a very clever way to desensitize monsters toward children so they won’t develop moral objections to their jobs. And that desensitization is reinforced even more through the community’s false belief that children are toxic contaminants to monsters. An entire society justifies the abuse of a vulnerable group by repeating a narrative along the lines of “they’re dangerous and we’re the victims.” Hmm… wonder what that reminds me of.

Finally, I want to talk about the ending, which feels very… Pixar. Boo returns to her room and says goodbye to Sully. As kids, we probably wanted them to stay together forever, but Pixar would never do that. And honestly, that’s a good thing. Boo is happy to go back to her room and her toys, especially Jessie, which everyone noticed. And that makes perfect sense because she has her family, she has a life outside Monstropolis. She doesn’t cling to Sully. She understands that she doesn’t belong in that world. And the lovable giant leaves. And the moment when Boo opens the closet and sees only her clothes hanging there is… heartbreaking.

And of course, we all remember the final moment of the movie, when Sully gets to see Boo again after such a long time. But we don’t see her. As a kid, that frustrated me because I wanted us to see her one last time too. But honestly, it’s so much better this way. Boo had probably grown up by then, and the movie didn’t want to break the magic.