Monsters University

This is Pixar’s first prequel and also a technical threshold. The studio moved here to a new physically based, ray traced global illumination system; where a single shot had previously needed hundreds of placed point lights, a handful of area lights now did the work. Christophe Hery architected that change, and what it puts on screen is soft shadow and a consistent response to light across glass, fur and grass. The odd consequence is that a prequel looks newer than the film it precedes. The brave decision is at the end. Mike and Sulley do not reach their goal. They are expelled, and they enter the company through the mail room. That is an unusual promise to break in family animation, and it is why the film plays differently to adults than to children. The middle, by contrast, runs on a straight tournament frame: the Scare Games, the misfits, the elimination rounds. For campus texture the crew visited Harvard, Stanford, Cornell and MIT, and spent weeks inside fraternity houses. For: viewers who like the campus comedy shape and want an ending that takes failure seriously. Not for: anyone expecting the emotional weight the first film carried through Boo, since no bond of that kind exists here and most of the hundred and four minutes belongs to the contest.