IMDB Movies

One of my favorite movies of all time is Monsters, Inc.  The movie tells the story of James P. Sullivan (John Goodman) and Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal), a veritable scream team, working for the giant industrial company, Monsters, Incorporated.  Sullivan's job is to sneak into children's bedrooms at night and scare them, while Wazowski captures the energy from the screams in tanks.  The scream tanks are then refined into energy that powers their home city of Monstropolis.  Complicating things is Randall, (Steve Buscemi) a monster bent on toppling Sullivan's record of strong scream totals.  Randall will stop at nothing to take down Sullivan and Wazowski's team, and at times, the competition goes beyond their duties at the company.

I loved this movie because it talked about the the evils of a large corporation whose bosses care only about themselves, and not the good of the people.  It has relevance to the real world because of the corporate greed that we see in our own world with companies like Enron and World Com, who went bankrupt after misleading investors and using shady business practices.  The movie also did something that many great movies do: explored an apparently hidden link between myths we tell in our own world and a secret world that is present, but at the same time hidden from our unsuspecting eyes.  Other examples of this are Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl series, where faeries live on the same Earth as humans do, and ride geothermal currents to the surface, and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, which says that the reason we never see Hobbits is that they're scared of people.  Monsters, Inc. explores this theme in a powerful way, giving a reason and meaning to the myth that there are monsters in our closets and under our beds.  It's not scary, director Pete Docter (also the director of Toy Story and Wall-E) says, it's just how monsters are able to power their society.  It's this link that adds that extra layer of intrigue to an already fantastic story.