YMMV / Monsters, Inc.

• Accidental Innuendo: "PUT THAT THING BACK WHERE IT CAME FROM OR SO HELP ME!"
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Following The Reveal, Mr. Waternoose and his motives can be perceived in several different ways.
    • Waternoose proudly states early in the film that his family has run Monsters, Inc. for three generations, but he fears that the company will collapse under his watch due to the worsening energy crisis. When he resorts to kidnapping children and trying to forcefully take their screams, is he genuinely doing it to help the people of Monstropolis, or just trying to save the company and his own reputation?
    • While he's much less enthusiastic about it than his associate, it's implied that Waternoose was still the mastermind of the plan and hired Randall to carry it out. Or it might still have been Randall's plan, and he convinced Waternoose to go through with it. Does this make Waternoose a Well-Intentioned Extremist forced to stoop to Randall's level, or just as unapologetically cruel and heartless as Randall himself? Furthermore, was Waternoose's Face–Heel Turn his own doing, or was it due to Randall's influence, given the latter's own Start of Darkness happened long before?
    • Many of Waternoose and Sulley's interactions indicate that Waternoose serves as a father figure of sorts to Sulley, and Waternoose later expresses displeasure when he has to banish Mike and Sulley due to Randall's mishandling of the plan, even telling Randall to his face that he isn't half as good a scarer as Sulley was. Does Waternoose genuinely regret banishing a monster he treated like a son? Or was he more concerned about the damage the company would suffer without its top scarer, on the chance that Randall's Scream Extractor didn't work?
  • Why were the children getting harder to scare? Some viewers think that they've been trying to scare the same kids for too long and they've gotten too old (interpreting the girl listening to rock music as having gotten older without the monsters noticing), but an image on the news implies that it has something to do with the kids watching TV. Does this mean they've been watching kids' shows with Benevolent Monsters? Or have they been watching something that stated there were no such things as monsters? Or were they watching something scary that desensitised them to monsters? If it's the latter, was it news (this movie did come out around 9/11 after all), or simply horror-themed movies and TV?
• Alternative Joke Interpretation: At one point, a monster tries to scare a girl his assistant claims is only six, only for her to be already awake, listening to rock music, and walking up close to him without flinching. Has she aged by 7-11 years without the monsters noticing, or is she just a very tough six-year-old?
• Award Snub:
  • The film famously/infamously (depending on your POV) lost the inaugural Best Animated Feature Oscar to Shrek, much to the chagrin of many Pixar fans and critics.
  • Some would argue that it was also robbed of a nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
• Awesome Music:
  • "If I Didn't Have You", which finally earned Randy Newman an Oscar for Best Original Song after 15 non-winning nominations.
  • The two cues setting up the Scare Floor, "Enter the Heroes" and the Benny Goodman-esque "The Scare Floor." SiIvaGunner mashed up the latter with King Dice's song from Cuphead and it's glorious.
  • There's also the Dixieland jazz-style intro playing to the 2D animated opening credits, letting the audience know that this is going to be a fun time.
• Catharsis Factor: Considering how monstrously vile he is, how he banished Mike and Sulley to the human world and how he Would Hurt a Child, it's endlessly satisfying to watch Randall get banished to the human world and get beaten up by a human mother. With a shovel, no less.
• Complete Monster: Randall Boggs considers himself the greatest Scarer in Monstropolis, and goes to truly depraved lengths to outdo his rival James P. "Sulley" Sullivan. Driven by Envy and petty hatred of Sulley ever since he lost a scaring competition in college, Randall is an arrogant jerk who frequently bullies his coworkers at Monsters, Inc. in his quest to hit "big numbers". Revealed to be scheming to "revolutionize the industry" of Scaring, Randall has used his abused minion Fungus to create a Scream Extractor device that tortures and suffocates those it is used on. Financed by Henry J. Waternoose III, Randall intends to kidnap children—starting with the toddler Mary "Boo" Gibbs—and use the Extractor to torment screams out of them and create an endless supply of scream energy, making himself rich and famous in the process of finally proving his superiority to Sulley. When Sulley and Mike Wazowski try to save Boo and stop Randall's scheme, Randall first tries to torture Mike with the Extractor, then attempts to murder them both while mocking Sulley over his planned use of Boo as the Extractor's first victim. Lacking the well-intentioned goals of Waternoose and defined by jealousy, Randall is uncaring of the lethality of the Extractor or the pain of the countless children he will subject to it, only concerned with lining his pockets and fluffing his ego.
• Consolation Award: It's pretty much acknowledged that Randy Newman only won the Oscar because it was one of the weakest years for the Best Song category and Newman had already lost many times.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • The scene of Sulley watching (what he believes is) Boo being mutilated by the trash compactor. Like the Looney Tunes short it's referencing, there's obviously nothing funny about a child being brutally killed, but Sulley's melodramatic reactions to what we explicitly know isn't happening take it from tragic to hilarious.
  • Randall beating the crap out of Sulley and almost choking him to death? Terrifying. Mike being completely oblivious to this and making a rambling apology as Sulley's being choked to death? Hilarious!
• Draco in Leather Pants: A good number of Randall's fans are convinced that he was just stressed out and didn't really do anything wrong. The more extreme ones see him as an orphan who's discriminated against for being a reptile, both in-universe and out. As Disney will tell you, any type of material that contradicts these views is immediately deemed non-canon or just ignored.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Roz has a lot of fans. Being a Deadpan Snarker slug who's Mike's Sitcom Arch-Nemesis and also the head of the CDA certainly doesn't hurt one bit.
  • George Sanderson has a lot of people who feel bad for him being a victim of two 2319s. In the end, they were glad to see he got his justice.
• Epileptic Trees: Boo is the central figure of the Pixar Theory, that all the studio's films share the same universe. It states that she became obsessed with reconnecting with Sulley and discovered an erratic form of time travel that resulted in the Easter Eggs in all the other films, eventually becoming the witch from Brave and causing the introduction of magic into the world in the first place.
• Estrogen Brigade:
  • Randall is very popular among female fans, if all the fanart of him is evidence enough.
  • To some extent, Mike and Sulley seem to be really popular among female fans as well (especially shippers).
• Evil Is Cool: While likely not the film's intention, Randall Boggs gets this from some fans thanks to his cool design, unique ability, Deadpan Snarker tendencies, and being surprisingly threatening when his true nature is revealed.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: Randall making a Heel–Face Turn is a popular topic in fanfics.
  • Speculating about how much Boo might remember of her adventure in Monstropolis and what kind of person she might grow up to be.
• Fanon:
  • In humanization fanart, Mike is often given bangs as an allusion to him being a Cyclops in the movie.
  • Fans have come up with two explanations for why monsters thought humans were toxic. Either 1.) somebody down the line lied that they were so that the scarers wouldn't feel sorry for the kids, or 2.) in the past, a scarer worked with a sick kid, caught whatever they had, and concluded that humans were toxic.
• First Installment Wins: While Monsters University and Monsters at Work are both well liked in their own right, most fans agree that neither reaches the quality of the original Monsters Inc..
• Foe Yay Shipping: Some fans ship Sulley/Randall, despite Randall viciously hating Sulley and even trying to kill him multiple times throughout the movie.
• Fountain of Memes: Mike has become this, from scenes of him being blurred out, to getting hit in the crotch, to "Put that thing back where it came from or so help me!" to simply falling over, almost everything he's done has become a meme.
• Friendly Fandoms: Fans of this film can have some of this with Shrek, due to their shared memes and buddy comedy plots. However, it can lead into Fandom Rivalry due to the above mentioned Award Snub.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Randall's behavior in the original film becomes worse, not to mention much pettier, when you watch the prequel and realize that for months, if not years, he'd been beaten out as Scare Leader by what essentially amounts to a college dropout.
  • Randall's nastiness towards Mike also becomes this after said prequel as well: not only did they used to be roommates and friends, Mike's advice to Randall to use his invisibility is what helped him become such a good scarer in the first place. Even later coming close to killing Sulley.
  • Not to mention, Mike's bitterness over the possibility of losing his job reflects all the hard work and turmoil he had to go through to have his job as a Scare Assistant.
  • Boo narrowly avoids being crushed to death into the shape of a cube. However, in Cars 2, this is precisely what happens to Leland Turbo.
  • The 23-19 scene became this once people started to compare the name of the code and behavior of the CDA grunts, with the actions undertaken by various governments during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• He Really Can Act: Billy Crystal is most well-known for his comedic work, but he delivers Mike's emotional dialogue heartbreakingly realistically, particularly Mike's monologue to Sulley when they're trapped in the Himalayas.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • The prequel revealed that Sulley and Mike weren't always friends, with the duo having sort of a bitter rivalry. Although they do end up warming up to each other by the end of said prequel, this is the flick that really shows just how much their friendship has evolved.
  • Monsters University reveals that Mike wanted to be a scarer as a kid but suffered from the issue of simply not being scary enough to do it no matter how much effort he put into it. This makes the ending of the movie where they discover laughter to be a bigger source of power and he becomes one of the biggest in the business to be a major Earn Your Happy Ending.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In the outtakes, a character accidentally calls Sulley "Solomon" and is called out for his mistake. Now rather amusing to those who have read the NES Godzilla Creepypasta and are familiar with the Kaiju named Solomon there…
  • This isn't the last time we'd see a cube of garbage in a Pixar movie.
  • In the teaser trailer, Sulley says to Mike "You remember the fifth grade, when you spent all your time sending notes to Susie Boyles? The rest of us were studying geography." Monsters University reveals that not only did Mike and Sulley not meet until college, but Mike was a diligent student while Sulley spent most of his time partying.
  • In the charades trailer, Sulley correctly guessed Mike's charade as Star Wars. 11 years after the film came out, Disney, the parent company of Pixar, bought the rights to Star Wars.
  • During "If I Didn't Have You", Mike mentions that he sometimes gets a little blue. Monsters at Work would later give Mike a Sitcom Arch-Nemesis in the form of Gary Gibbs, whose design is just a blue-colored version of Mike.
  • Towards the beginning of the movie, Mike calls Sulley (voiced by John Goodman) "Big Daddy." A few years later, in The Princess and the Frog, John Goodman would voice ANOTHER character nicknamed "Big Daddy."
  • This isn't the last Disney-Pixar movie where the protagonist's seemingly-benevolent overseer is actually involved in the evil plot they've been investigating and gets exposed via Engineered Public Confession.
• It Was His Sled:
  • Waternoose is the main villain.
  • Roz is the leader of the CDA. Making this worse is that she appears in Monsters University in her CDA armor, and her voice (also provided by Bob Peterson) is unmistakable.
• Jerkass Woobie: Waternoose, up until he crosses the Moral Event Horizon, is doing what he does out of genuine concern for the monster world and has real fatherly affection for Sulley, feeling clear regret over having to betray him.
• Love to Hate: Randall Boggs. Although the writers were clearly trying to get the audience to root against him, he's one of Pixar's most popular villains thanks to Steve Buscemi's performance.
• Memetic Molester: Waternoose. Several YouTube editors have taken advantage of his frequent use of the word "child" and of course the chase scene where he yells at Sulley to "GIVE ME THE CHILD!!! GIVE HER TO ME!!!" and tries to break down a door to get to her.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Waternoose's line, "I'll kidnap a thousand children before I let this company die!" is subject to snowclones/Photoshops on Tumblr and other sites.
    • The line is even more popular among Latin American audiences. For the film's Mexican Spanish dub, the quote was dubbed as ¡Robaré los necesarios para salvar esta compañía! (I'll steal all the kids I need to save this company!) leading to its extensive use in discussions regarding politics and other real world issues, as well as a far more conventional meme mocking things such as reposting memes and stealing them from other pages.
  • Also popular in the Latin American countries and related to the dub is the line "Well, a kid flew right over me and blasted a car with its laser vision^note Translated as Un niño flotó sobre mí y voló un auto con su rayo láser." Though this is mostly due to the Argentine-like accent used for the character rather than the actual line.
  • "Put that thing back where it came from, or so help me!"
  • "WELCOME TO THE HIMALAYAS!"
  • "Wazowski, you didn't file your paperwork last night."
    • "I'm watching you, Wazowski. Always watching! Always!"
    • "Your stunned silence is very reassuring."
  • Actually, it's your word against yours! "I'll kidnap a thousand children before I let this company die!"
  • Covering Mike's face on any packaging he appears on has bled out into real life. Occasionally followed up with variations of "I can't believe it... I'm in a (object with Mike Wazowski's face covered on it)!".
    • Even Disney+ has gotten in on the joke.
  • Mike's scream when he has Roz's office window shut on his hands, as well as when a kid bites him. This has led to videos on YouTube like these.
  • "You and I are a team. Nothing's more important than our friendship," thanks to its prominence in Baby Driver.
    • "Stop feeding me lines from Monsters Inc!"
  • Way too many of Mike's scenes to count. Pretty much everything he's done has become a meme at some point.
  • A Photoshop of Sulley's face on Mike's body has become popular as a reaction to "bruh moments".
  • "Do you hear that? It's the winds of change..."
  • The iconic Team Power Walk of the Scarers has become this in the wake of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Captions over the video usually go along the lines of "girls returning to the salon once quarantine lifts", or "how everyone will be when they get to go to the club again".
  • Another COVID-19 related meme is to reference "23-19" as a way to poke some much-needed jest at the panic induced by the rapid spread of the virus.
  • Monsters Inc. Theme Song (Earrape), a heavily bass-boosted version of the main theme often played to Jump Scare unsuspecting viewers.
  • During Election Week 2020, when votes came in far slower than usual thanks to the increased amount of mail-in votes, many memes went around comparing the wait for the final results to Sulley and Randall's shifting vote tallies during the first Scare Floor sequence. This also led to memes about "Sullivan 2020" and the like.
  • Boo being terrified by Sulley's roar with her being photoshopped to wear headphones and holding a PS4 controller has been used as a reaction image for raging or horrified gamers.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Randall and Waternoose's plan, which involves kidnapping children and using the Scream Extractor to suck the screams from them, which if the effects on Fungus are considered standard, would kill them through suffocation by sucking the very air from their lungs along with the screams.
  • Speaking of which, if Randall didn't cross it by planning the above, then he crossed it by trying to use the Scream Extractor on Mike.
  • And if this wasn't bad enough, Waternoose corners Sulley and Boo in the climax and makes it clear that he intends to straight-up murder them because they know too much. In his own words, "I'll kidnap a thousand children before I let this company die! And I'll silence anyone who gets in my way!"
  • Doubles as a Tear Jerker, because Sully considered him a father figure.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: Monsters, Inc. Scream Team for the PS1 and PS2 is one of the many copycats of Super Mario 64, but instead of lazily rehashing the basic concept to make a quick buck the developers instead opted to produce wonderfully unique levels to give each world its own feel; in other words, they copied Super Mario 64's methods, but kept the final product its own distinction from its competitors. It also helps that the game has a very snazzy jazz soundtrack and stellar graphics for its time.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • The Abominable Snowman only has a brief scene, but remains one of the most well-liked characters in the movie. It no doubt let him being brought back in Monsters at Work, where he got a happy ending
  • The mother and son living in the trailer who mistaken Randall as an alligator after he is banished to the human world. Though only their silhouettes are shown, they are rather popular in their brief appearance, especially the mother for beating up Randall with a shovel. Their popularity also led them to return in Kingdom Hearts III, reenacting the same karmic justice on Randall after he is defeated.
  • In the Latin American dub, the purple monster in the TV interviews saying that the kid blasted a car with its laser vision. Mostly due to the completely out of place Argentinian accent the actor gave it. To the point it is very easy to find remixes of that minor scene in Spanish.
• Pop Culture Holiday: Code 2319 inspired a whole fan day dedicated to the film on February 3, 2019 (2/3/19 in US order).
• Popular with Furries: Though not animals per se, several monsters like Sulley and Randall are popular among furries for their animalistic traits.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: While Scream Team is a pretty well regarded 3D platformer in its own right, the same can't be said for the far more obscure PS2-exclusive Monsters, Inc. game, which has ugly graphics that look about on par with a PS1 game, poorly designed platforming with extremely difficult sections early on in the game (the second level features a mail train segment which lasts a long time and instantly kills Sulley if he falls at any point while the third level has a chimney segment which requires pinpoint-perfect reflexes and accuracy and also has a segment that will take you right back to the beginning of the level without telling you), demotes Mike to an NPC and has No Ending.
• Realism-Induced Horror:
  • Notice that the Big Bad's plan is essentially to kidnap children and use them for slave labor...
  • Also when Sulley thinks Boo is being crushed by the trash compactor.
• Rooting for the Empire: Although many fans can agree that it's hard to hate Sulley and Mike, many fans (particurally female fans) found themselves rooting for Randall over said characters to the point where some were disappointed that he didn't win in the end, despite the fact that he was quite willing to help Waternoose in kidnapping innocent children and clearly took much delight in what he was doing.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • Owing to its plethora of colorful monsters and creatures, not to mention the presence of Frank Oz, this has been called "the best Muppet movie never made by Jim Henson". Fitting, as Pete Docter is a huge Henson fan and even considered being a Muppeteer before getting into animation.
  • It's also considered to be the best animated (and, by extension, best kid-friendly) movie The Coen Brothers never made, not only due to their regular stars appearing in this but the plot wouldn't be out of place in their works, either.
• Sweetness Aversion: Mike and Celia are Sickeningly Sweethearts who use pet names for each other. This type of stuff may be hard to stomach, depending on how old the viewer is.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Impressive as it was at the time, the CGI has not aged all that well. The lighting still makes everything look kind of plastic, and Boo looks more like a doll than a human, something Pixar still hadn't quite nailed by 2001 (though you can blame two Toy Story movies for that). Compare this to Monsters University immediately before or after, a movie where Pixar actually changed their lighting system to achieve better visual effects.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Randall Boggs. In-universe, with the exception of Fungus and Waternoose, the characters don't take him too seriously and he's quickly over-shadowed by Sulley. The fans, on the other hand, consider him one of the best (if not the best) Pixar villains due to how malicious he is, his determination and his sympathetic potrayal in University. It helps that he's voiced by Steve Buscemi (who's known for playing violently deranged characters with bad tempers).
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Probably not as impressive today, but when the technology of CGI was still relatively at its bare minimum at the time, great pains were taken to make Sulley's fur look real. That's not even mentioning Randall's disappearing acts.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Didactic?: Due to focusing on a company, there's a lot you could read into this movie about energy use, humane treatment, and the rights of whistle blowers if you think too hard about it.
• Woolseyism: In the outtakes in the German dub, the joke of Sulley flubbing a line leads to a good one: when trying to confess to Mike about the human child he's hidden in the bag, Sulley accidentally says "Flasche" (bottle) instead of "Tasche" (bag). Mike quips, "Well, unless you have a script where Boo appears as a genie".

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