I was never a huge fan of the Toy Story series -- mainly because I never found the stories involving, nor Woody all that endearing a character. It had innovative animation, but pretty pictures only go so far.

With Monster’s, Inc. John Lasseter and his Pixar team have struck the perfect balance among phenomenal animation, an interesting and well-thought-out story, and endearing characters. I won’t go into detail in explaining this film’s premise. The screenwriters do a convincing job at elaborating the age-old myth that monsters hide in the closets of sleeping children. Why they hide and scare children involves Monsters, Inc., the utilities company, and how it goes about supplying power to the city of Monstropolis.

At the film’s heart are Sulley and Mike -- two monsters struggling to get a marooned human child back to her world before paranoid authorities and a slimy reptilian villain named Randall find out.

John Goodman and Billy Crystal are perfectly cast as Sulley and Mike, while Steve Buscemi voices Randall with the requisite amount of creepiness and cunning befitting a memorable bad guy. Every other performance is excellent, and the character animation is the best I have seen since Shrek. Scratch that . . . it’s better than Shrek.

The Pixar team manages to infuse every frame in Monsters, Inc. with eye-popping photo-realistic quality. Every frame in Monsters, Inc. has amazing detail and mesmerizing depth of field. The textures, lighting design, and surfaces are very lifelike, unencumbered by any flatness or loss of brilliance in colors. Sulley’s hair is just amazing, as are the flakes of snow that end up stuck to it. Every strand moves with a fluidity that is as organic as I’ve ever seen in an animated feature. This is a film where the detail in each scene says more than any one set piece.

Like the Toy Story movies, Monsters, Inc. benefits from direct-to-digital, state-of-the-art video and audio. Animation cells were transferred directly to the DVD authoring process without an intermediate film print. I watched both the widescreen and the recomposed full-screen versions and the only flaw in this otherwise fine transfer was a rather jolting layer change that happened in chapter 25. I’d say that I was seeing things but a colleague also experienced the same glitch on a different DVD player.

The Dolby Digital soundtrack is equally impressive. Like the visuals, the soundtrack displays strength in its details. It is not an in-your-face mix, but rather goes about its job punctuating what happens on screen. Foley elements, voices, and Randy Newman’s music all coexist in a seamless soundscape which whispers as well as it screams.

The majority of extras on this two-disc set are very good -- and enjoyable. I did find some unnecessary "filler" in addition to different links pointing to the same material. What shined through were an excellent commentary, some nifty, succinct production vignettes, and one hilarious Academy Award-winning animated short called For the Birds. The commentary features Pete Docter and Lee Unkrich, two Monsters, Inc. directors, who did a thorough job talking about the technical and creative decisions behind the scenes. I especially enjoyed their anecdotes about the roles that their own children played throughout the film.

Hands down, my favorite production vignettes were those involving the animation. The sheer amount of modeling and prototyping that happened before Monsters, Inc. could go into production was mind-boggling. In particular, the technology that allowed Sulley’s hair and Boo’s T-shirt to respect the laws of physics left me in awe. This is very cool stuff.

About the only aspect of this film that came off as unoriginal was Randy Newman’s title song "If I Didn’t Have You." The first time I heard John Goodman and Billy Crystal singing about friendship I could have sworn Woody and Buzz were going to appear in frame. I know the principle of friendship is a major element in Pixar story lines but it would have been good to hear a song that did not sound derivative of Newman’s "You’ve Got a Friend in Me."