Monsters at Work review – Pixar spin-off is scarily subpar

There’s a lot of potential in Disney+’s new animated series Monsters at Work. A spin-off from the hit Pixar film Monsters, Inc, released in 2001 (I know, I know, 20 years ago. I find it best not to dwell), it picks up exactly where the original story left off. The Monstropolis scream factory has discovered that children’s laughter is a much more potent source of power than their screams of fear and is hurrying to turn itself over to the production of the former rather than the latter. Sully (John Goodman) and Mike (Billy Crystal) are now in charge. Roz (Bob Peterson) is out, but replaced by her remarkably similar sister Roze (also voiced by Peterson). Scarers are trying to learn to become jokers, and rare is the monster for whom one comes as naturally as the other. Silent film to talkies, analogue to digital, wartime to peacetime, labourers to robots – the metaphors veritably fling themselves at you.

And none of them is pressed into service. This is Disney, after all, and I suppose we must reconcile our adult selves to the fact that, useful as it would be for young viewers to know about the inherent instability of modern working life (it’s robots to redundancy, kids!), children’s entertainment is better off rooting itself elsewhere.

Thus, instead, we follow newcomer Tylor Tuskmon (Ben Feldman), a top graduate from Monsters University and one of the last recruited to the factory as a scarer, who turns up full of enthusiasm and ambition on his first day of the job, only to be rerouted into Mift – Monsters Inc Facilities Team. They are a motley crew of engineers – none of whom is sufficiently charming, funny or well-delineated to function as an instantly endearing or memorable character – led by over-eager boss Fritz (“Think of me as a father figure! A grandfather figure! An uncle who sometimes showed up out of the blue after he got divorced from your biological aunt but is really cool!”). Without being a snob, or dismissive, or anything else that might raise the lesson-learning stakes a little, Tylor does not particularly wish to be of their number. Will he gradually warm to the gang? Will he learn to appreciate the unseen work they do all day every day to ensure the smooth running of the workplace and by extension the whole of Monstropolis? Even if he retains his scarer ambitions, will he recognise that it takes all sorts to make a world? We can but wait and see.

It feels like a long wait at times. The first two half-hour episodes (the only ones of the 10 that were available for review) are extraordinarily slow. Even allowing for the fact that any new endeavour – even a spin-off – needs a little time for it and its characters to bed in, it still feels as if we are watching the penultimate draft of a show rather than the final, polished version. The second episode in particular seems to spend half its running time on an uninventive, leaden initiation ritual for Tylor before it approaches the minimal storyline that takes up the rest.

Making a funny programme out of the need to be funny is always quite an undertaking, and the script here is unmistakably sub-Pixar where it needs to be very, very consistently Pixarian or better. Most of the jokes are painfully laboured – there is a gag about a 36-and-a-half-hour energy drink that seems to last as long as the supposed boost provided – or unlikely to appeal to children (unless they are particular fans of obscure malapropisms such as “girdles” for “girders”). As the monsters set out on their nighttime adventures and fall back through the doors on what is now the laugh-floor of Monsters Inc, exhausted by their futile efforts to amuse the children on the other side, a new and unwanted metaphor presents itself: that of the monsters’ lacklustre attempts as a reflection of the series as a whole.

It may improve. I hope so. There is plenty of potential here (and talent – Feldman in particular manages to establish Tylor as a worthwhile lead). Roze, for all her sluggish mien, may yet provide some much needed bite, as her sister did before her. But it needs another pass through the laugh factory. A thorough sanding down and a tightening of the plot screws by Mift and a few more squirts of lubricant from old hands such as Goodman and Crystal – whose scenes merely remind us of past glories – could create a vehicle truly fit for comic purpose. Monsters: get to work.