Old guy from Monsters University

Given the success of Pixar’s and Pixar’s featurette have shown, Mike and Sulley are not the close friends that we came to know them as in this movie, but are instead arch-rivals in Scaring who are determined to outdo one another.

Set to the delightful strains of Andrew W.K.’s “Party Hard”, the new trailer gives a definite impression that Monsters University is just like any other college campus – complete with jocks, geeks, cheerleaders, slackers, liberal arts majors, frat boys and people who insist on playing the acoustic guitar at parties.

If anything, the plot is looking a little bit too generic. Sulley and Mike are a mismatched pair thrown together as roommates, and Mike becomes jealous of Sulley’s innate prowess in the field of Scaring, vowing to beat his grades by the end of their first year. Desperate to join the cool cliques and afraid of being lumped in with the nerdy Oozma Kappa fraternity, Mike enters the university’s annual Scare Games and – for reasons not yet explained – is threatened with expulsion by the Dean if he doesn’t win.

The whole set-up sounds surprisingly conventional for a Pixar movie, but taking into account the fact that the denizens of Monsters University are unusually hairy, slimy or betentacled (even more so than the average college student), the film could actually turn out to be quite a clever parody or subversion of the tropes usually associated with college coming-of-age stories. There are some great visual gags in this trailer that we’ve not seen before, along with the previously shown clip of an unfortunate snail-shaped monster “hurrying” to class.

Pixar have even set up a university website for prospective students to peruse, a surprisingly straight-faced and in-depth introduction to the fictional institution and its schools of Scaring, Science, Business, Engineering and Liberal Arts & Monstrosities. Between their student testimonials and their offer of financial aid for tuition fees, you may end up wanting to apply for admission. Just make sure you got the right score on your MAT (Monster Aptitude Test).