I had to sub for a class last week where the teacher’s lesson plan basically amounted to “Steal a tape from one of the teachers next door and just play a movie”.
So I picked Monsters Inc what with it being around Halloween and all. Since I had to substitute for five periods, I watched the better part of the whole movie about two and a half times. This got me thinking about Monsters Inc (the company, not the movie)
Mr. Waternoose goes on about how ‘toxic’ children are, but he clearly isn’t afraid of them. It seems like the higher-ups in Monstropolis want to maintain this irrational fear of children. Scaring is perceived as dangerous, but necessary work, kind of like coal mining if you think about it. So why the farce? It isn’t limited to Monsters Inc, since the CDC keeps showing up every time as so much as a squeaky toy finds its way into the monster world.
Also, the whole setup of the story is that Randall and Fungus developed some machine that can extract scream directly out of children. Sully discovers this by accident. But if you look back on that scene after knowing the whole plot, why does Randall have the door just sitting there? I would have assumed he was going to abduct boo at the time, but he doesn’t. Was he ‘casing’ the place, only planning on abducting her later?
Mike has this terror of getting banished, but it seems so easy for them to return (simply find another door). Speaking of Mike, what was his job title? All the scarers had these assistants, who seemed to do little more than do paperwork and toady up to the scarers.
As a father of two and having seen this movie more times than I can count, I’ll take a crack…
Waternoose knows kids are not toxic, so he is not afraid, but this may not be generally known in Monstropolis. It is a farce because they don’t want to have anyone messing with their “system.”
I would have to go back and look at that scene, but Randall is equal parts careless and arrogant, and perceives himself as untouchable , as narcissistic people often are
Having never actually been banished, Mike is afraid, as he does not know what it is like. Fear of the unknown… And yes, Mike is an assistant with no job description other than door prep and paperwork. Look at the extras on the DVD for more about the system.
Also, if everyone knew kids were safe, there could be competition. If just anyone could scare free energy by terrorizing kids–and it weren’t seen as dangerous work–then Monsters, Inc. would lose business. I get the sense that Monsters, Inc.'s monopoly runs rather unchecked. However, they’re still trying to make a better product. This could be proof that a competition-free market doens’t stifle innovation and the development of new technology.
What I want to know is this: where do they get the doors? How does Monsters, Inc. acquire them when a child moves into a room? Could a private citizen get a door of his or her own? Ahhhh, the economics of Monstropolis…
I’ve just assumed that the doors only work one way. If you open the door inside Monstropolis, it leads to a closet on Earth. But if you open the door on Earth from the other side, it only leads to the ordinary closet. Thus, returning to Earth is not so easy. Sully was lucky that Monstropolis happened to be sending a scarer through that door in Tibet at that particular time.
Sully sees the door just sitting there, investigates and winds up with Boo. Randall comes back to abduct her but she’s already gone. No idea what he was doing between setting up the door and abducting her.
The rumor about children being toxic is probably around to keep the human world and the monster world separate. It’s not just that Monster Inc. wants a monopoly, if any untrained monster could go over to the human world humans would find out monsters exist and possibly cause them trouble.
Banishment is also ostracization. Even if you find a way back, the other monsters will treat you as contaminated from your time in the human world.
Mike seems to do not just the paperwork, but run the machines and keep everything moving smoothly.
I somehow had the impression that MI kept the rumor of children being toxic alive because it allowed them to continue their operations unimpeded. Basically it’s ok for them to scare children since they are toxic but if it was discovered that they weren’t then there may be resistance in the monster world to MI’s continued “exploitation” of them.
The movie doesn’t get into this, but I believe the backstory for the film is that the doors are installed in the human world by monsters when homes are constructed. Somehow they sneak into the human world, go to construction sites in the dark, then swap out mundane doors with the “portal” doors when no one is watching.
You might just as well ask why kids are frightened of the monsters when most of them aren’t actually harmful.
The premise is that there are two different worlds, each one doesn’t really understand the other, and sees it as something frightening. Obviously, there’s a lot the monsters don’t know about human kids. They never worked out before that laughter is more powerful than fright, for a start. They’re not deliberately deceiving the public, they really do think the kids are dangerous.
Is it that someone else set up the door for him, his assistant maybe. And then he came later with the cage to put her in. Maybe it was less suspicious that way then both of them being in there at once?
The doors work so that they open between the kids bedroom and closet when unactivated but then the door at Monsters Inc. is activated it takes over and now is a connection to the kids bedroom.
Well, kids are well known to be riddled with germs.
I may be mis-remembering, but weren’t they looking for a better product because Monsteropolis was in the middle of an energy crisis?
Incidentally, since the movie ends with the monsters no longer frightening children, have you ever thought about how weird that would be on our side of the closet door? Imagine if, all of the sudden, all over the world, kids just stopped seeing monsters at night. It might take a while to notice, but once they did… how freaky would that be?