So……I’m kind of a Disney Nerd?

I always have been. Aladdin was the first movie I remember seeing in theaters, Lion King was the first VHS tape that I wore out from rewatches and Hunchback of Notre Dame was the first movie to ever make my jaw literally drop. If I ever finish this insane quest of mine, I’m planning on watching every Disney release including Home on the Range because that’s just how dedicated I am.

I bring this up because I know that traditionally, people associate Best Animated Feature with Disney and Pixar. Ever since this category was announced for the 74th Academy Awards 17 years ago, they have been nominated every year except two; one if you count the year their dub of Howl’s Moving Castle was technically nominated. When I watch through and talk about the later years of the ceremony, they are going to be coming up A LOT so I need to make sure that I don’t let my Disney Fanaticism make decisions for me.

I was afraid going into Monsters Inc. that because of that bias and nostalgia (I was 11 when I first saw this in theaters), I wasn’t going to be able to watch this movie with a critical eye. I know that this silly little blog doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things but I was still afraid that was going to not only declare this movie the automatic winner of every award it was nominated for without actually reviewing it critically first, I was afraid I was going to complain that Monsters Inc. should have been up for Best Picture.

At risk of spoiling the punchline, I can tell you that that did not happen. In fact, I think that out of the four awards it was up for, it really should have only won…maybe two? I think?

We’ll start with the one that I’m the most confident about: Best Original Score. The main theme song for Monsters Inc. is abso-freaking-lutely one of the best I’ve ever heard for an animated movie. It’s so jazzy and full of life. This theme exists solely to get you prepped for a fun, light-hearted magical romp into a world where bad things don’t happen and nothing can get you down. It is a jam.

The problem is that it’s nothing like the rest of the soundtrack. The award isn’t for best theme, it’s for best score and as a whole, the score is….decent. Maybe even above average. It just isn’t anything all that memorable, mainly because it’s often not used to full effect. It is the very definition of background music. It exists solely to subconsciously set moods, not to be memorable. If you’ve ever seen a First or Second Phase Marvel Movie, you know exactly the kind of music I’m talking about. It’s nothing that you’ll find yourself humming to yourself in the shower or wanting to listen to on Youtube, it just is.

Monsters Inc. did not win Best Original Score nor should it have. Fellowship of the Ring still deserves its win in that category.

Best Original Song, however, was a shoo-in. If I Didn’t Have You leaves me smiling like a kid who just saw Mike Wazowski eat a microphone. This song was written by the great Randy Newman as was the norm for Pixar at the time. Sung by Sully and Mike from the movie (John Goodman and Billy Crystal), this song is a love letter to their relationship talking about how incomplete they’d be without each other. Theirs is a level past bromance into familyship and it feels just as natural in the song as it did in the movie, if not more so.

Looking past the message, the song itself is just as jazzy as the intro in a slower, Rat Pack kind of way. It feels like a Sinatra style duet; it oozes charm and dares you to try not to be happy while listening to it because it knows how impossible that is.

Given how much I picked on Enya earlier, it should be no surprise to you that I think it was only fitting that it won this award.

Sound Editing‘s pretty cool. This is a movie populated by all kinds of monsters so the sound effects needed are going to be more than footsteps and doors. There’s the sounds of suckers, of slithering, of sashimi (yes, really), of all kinds of weird things that you would never hear in your day to day life so the people behind the scenes had to get incredibly inventive. A lot of the noises that you hear are mouth sounds pitched up or down to fit the monster in question.

This is the category I’m unsure on. On one hand, the sound editing in this movie is really, REALLY good but on the other hand, the movie it’s up against (and the movie it lost to) is Pearl Harbor. The main difference between the two is that while this movie had the room to be incredibly creative and inventive with its sounds, Pearl Harbor had to deal with a world that was not only far more grounded but faced with a real world tragedy that actually happened. It’s hard to say whether making creative, original noises trumps having to recreate noises that were created by missiles and jet engines.

Basically, the sound editing in Monsters Inc. is really good but I can’t say for sure yet if it deserved a win or loss.

Finally, we have the big one, Best Animated Feature.

I’ve already talked about Jimmy Neutron. It should come as no surprise that this is easily in the lead for Best Animated Feature. It has memorable, fully fleshed characters, environments that are creative and original and best of all, I laughed multiple times throughout Monsters Inc. If I only had Monsters Inc. and Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius to choose between for Best Animated Feature, Jimmy wouldn’t have even needed to show up for the ceremony. It’s that unfair.

Unfortunately for Monsters Inc., it had one more movie to contend with for this category. We’ll talk about the category as a whole and Monsters Inc.’s all star contender in the next one.