Monsters are a symbol of childhood fears. What are children afraid of? They are afraid of being left alone, especially by their parents. When one or both of a child's parents go to work during the day, mystery and anxiety must set in. If one of the parents work long hours and have little time to spend with the child, the anxiety and fear will be greater.
There is a fascination and a certain anxiety of children with the adult world: where do adults go during the day? As children we learned from the Flintstones that adults carried lunch boxes to a construction site, punched in their time cards (rocks) and loved to hear the horn signal lunch time or the end of day. Just as the title indicates, the Monsters exist in an Incorporated world like that of the Flintstones. "We scare, because we care". This catchy slogan and the ubiquitous eye logo is as capitalist as Mcdonald's golden arches. Let's be clear. This is not the Latin quarter of Victor Hugo's Paris. The world of the monsters is a clean, ordered city of hardworking money-makers. They rent appartments and eat in posh sushi restaurants named after the special effects great, Ray Harryhausen.
Mike and Sully are monster partners in the business of scaring little children during the night. In the Alvar Aaltoesque space of their corporate factory, Sully enters doors to become transported to a child's bedroom. He attempts to scare the child into screaming which is captured and measured by the monsters' factory. Apparently children's screams are the energy source of this nonsensical city. However, during one of Sully's work ventures, one child (appropriately named Boo) accidentally goes through the portal into the world of the monsters. As we have already learned through one mishap at the factory, if any child's things happen to get through the doors, chaos insues. It seems children and anything they touch are deemed so toxic in this world that special ops crews are brought in when a sock is accidentally stuck to a monster (this particular scene in my opinion is a subtle hommage to E.T.). Thus, children (if they make it through the portal) evoke fear in the monsters, which is a complete inversion of the traditional child monster relationship. When Boo enters the world of Mike and Sully, she is like Godzilla entering Tokyo or King Kong loose in New York.
Monsters Inc. is a reversal of the child's fear relationship to the adult world. The adult world of corporate jobs, sushi restaurants and systems of control (the aforementioned bio-hazard corps and police) is metaphorically embodied by the world of Monstropolis. Here, children get the last laugh. In this animated world, children are the so-called Monster, powerful and destructive and capable of inciting fear and hysteria. After all, isn't the adult's main purpose in raising a child to make them an orderly member of society? Colouring outside of the lines and breaking things are anathema to an adult. In the fantasy world of Monsters Inc. children are feared and capable of creating havoc on the world of adults.
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