Monsters at Work is Pixar’s first complete miss for me. Pixar has had a pretty incredible track record to date with only a few misses in their expansive roster of films; those being the Cars films and The Good Dinosaur. Yet these films still have their merits, most notably the beautiful animation, but there are other elements to enjoy too in these middle of the road films. Unfortunately, Monsters at Work doesn’t succeed in having these redeeming qualities. Perhaps it’s because instead of an hour and a half film this series subjects you to endure 5 hours’ worth of lackluster content and you don’t really get anything for it.
The shining light of Pixar is that the animation quality is always top-notch but there are times in the series that the animation stood out and was jarring to watch. There’s obviously been a lot of effort put into animated the show and there are some parts that are visually on par with earlier Pixar films but there are many other animated shows out there right now that look better and furthermore use the medium of animation to its full extent to make beautiful and visually appealing frames.
The characters are also a problem in the show. The show clearly wants to be a Monsters Inc. take on The Office or other workplace comedies, but it just doesn’t work and that’s in large part due to how they use and set up their characters. Now sitcoms are hardly known for having the most complex of characters, they’re often caricatures and have exaggerated personalities, but this show takes it to another level. All the characters are one-dimensional and stay that way throughout the entire series: Val only talks about how she and Tylor are best friends, Fritz cares about MIFTers and his Drooler Coolers, Duncan is an attempt at a Dwight character that fails, he only has one joke and that is that Tylor will steal his promotion and it gets old fast and Cutter is sarcastic. Tylor has a generic character arc that is incredibly predictable and boring and as a lead he’s not entirely likeable. This is the problem, to maintain an audience and get people invested the characters have to be fun to watch and have a good dynamic with one another but they never really click and the further the series goes on it makes it more difficult to watch.
At the same time as the MIFTers plot is going on we also get glimpses into what Mike and Sulley are up to as they try to manage the new Monsters Inc. These are easily the best parts of the series, while Sulley doesn’t really get anything to work with, Mike has the best jokes of the show (which isn’t a high bar to hit,) and these small plot points were often more entertaining than the main plot happening in the episode. This is a massive disappointment, while I was grateful for a little bit of levity from the main story, it just feels weak for the best part of the show to be something so small and involving characters the show didn’t even introduce.
The show isn’t awful, there’s some episodes and jokes here and there that work, and a killer intro song, but it’s not the Pixar standard we’ve grown accustomed to. Hopefully if Pixar keeps venturing into TV, then it’s better than their debut Disney+ show.
★★
