Monsters, Inc. (Blu-ray)

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It's a short leap from "pixel" to Pixar, and from Pixar to "pixie." Technical wizardry and a certain impishness abound when this crew gets an idea and runs with it. Counting "Up," the Pixar bunch has produced 10 hits, and "Monsters, Inc." hit the bulls-eye between "Toy Story 2" (1999) and "Finding Nemo" (2003). Disney trusted that writer Pete Docter could make the leap from writer on "Toy Story" and "Toy Story 2" to director, and he didn't let them down. He earned a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination for "Monsters, Inc.," and presided over a bunch of CGI animators who cranked it up a notch to make every monster hair look as if it were hand-drawn.

If you think about it, "Monsters, Inc." was a brainstorm that could have rained on a lot of children's parades. After all, despite their parents' best assurances to the contrary, here was a film that confirmed one of their deepest fears: that there ARE monsters under the bed and in the closet. But from the opening scene, which begins with a fright and ends with delight after a monster-in-training gets more scared by a mechanical kid than any kid ever could, the tone is set for an outing that shouldn't scare little ones any more than little Boo (Mary Gibbs). Boo is a giggly little toddler who enters the monster world through the portal of her closet door. She's not afraid of the big blue and purple monster named Sulley (John Goodman)--whom she calls "Kitty"--so why should kids in the audience curl up in fright?

That's part of the charm of this slightly risky film, which alleges that a parallel monster world exists, and that its city is powered by energy generated by screams from our human world. Like everything else these days, screams are becoming a dwindling resource because today's children are jaded. It takes a lot to get a scream out of them. And so the talented monsters who work as "scarers" at the Monsters, Inc. factory are treated like astronauts. They're the glamour guys, and among them there's a fierce competition to become top scarer. Nice-guy Sulley almost meets his match in Randall (Steve Buscemi), a slithery-looking dragon type who's the villain in this film. It's Randall who breaks the rules to work after-hours to try to up his numbers, and in so doing he leaves the door open. That's how Boo enters, and that's what sets the plot in motion. After that, it's

"Monsters, Inc." draws its inspiration from a five-minute animated film that Pixar chief John Lasseter made when he was a student. In "Nitemare" (1979) a child encounters monsters in his bedroom but learns that they mean him no harm. In this monster world, the odd creatures are treated like people. They brush their teeth, set their alarms, commute to their jobs carrying lunch buckets, and engage in workplace humor and conflicts. Welcome to Monstropolis (a take-off of Superman's Metropolis), a city that gets its power from a corporation that employs scare-bears whose sole job it is to pass through closet doors into the human world and frighten kids so that their screams can be bottled and transmuted into energy. There's the tyrannical boss (James Coburn) who looks like a crustacean and is plenty crusty in his demeanor, there's a droll dispatcher named Roz (voiced by Bob Peterson) who speaks in deadpan, and two workers as the main focus who could have been Jackie Gleason and Art Carney in a previous lifetime. Sulley and his lottery-ball shaped, wisecracking Cyclops of a friend Mike (Billy Crystal) are the stars of this show, and it's their attempts to protect Boo from discovery and return her safely home that provides the main plot. Randall, of course, has his own agenda, and it's the usual villain's credo: thwart, thwart, thwart. Complicating matters are Monstropolis's environmental police, who descend like a swat team whenever there's a contaminant from the human world. You see, it turns out that monsters are deathly afraid of humans!

As with other Pixar ventures, part of the fun is in seeing the details of the world that they've created, and while this one isn't as lavishly decorated as others, there are some nice touches. Mike's love interest, a monster named Celia (Jennifer Tilly) who has a Medusa hairdo, is drawn in a fun way, for example. When she talks about cutting her hair, the rattlesnakes on her head get the cutest look of terror! And when Mike tries to sweet-talk Rox after he forgets to turn in paperwork, flattery like "Oozing blob" doesn't get him anywhere. Another game we get to play with a new Pixar movie is "find the Ratzenberger." Pixar has used the "Cheers" actor in every movie as their good luck charm, and he turns up here as the voice of The Abominable Snowman.