Pete Docter will likely be showered with praise come Friday, when his newest film Up – my review appears later this morning – arrives in theaters. Yet the director also deserves kudos for his feature debut, Monsters, Inc., which despite being a financial and critical success upon its release in 2001, seems to have become something of a forgotten member of the illustrious Pixar club. It’s an undeserved fate, given the pitch-perfect blend of sweetness and wise-cracking comedy delivered by this tale of two monsters, shaggy blue Sully (voiced by John Goodman) and one-eyed Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal), whose lives harvesting human children’s screams for Monster’s Inc. – screams being the energy source that powers all of Monstropolis – are thrown for a loop when a young girl, affectionately dubbed “Boo” and thought by Mike and Sully to be, like all kids, toxic, crosses over into their world. Envisioning monsters as a humorous species who frighten tykes for a living is cute. Yet what sets Monsters, Inc. apart is the execution of its set-up, with Docter (working from a script co-written by Finding Nemo and WALL-E helmer Andrew Stanton) generating squish-free pathos by keeping the focus on his leads’ interpersonal dynamics – a rapport enlivened by Crystal’s expert vocal performance, and superb Abbot-and-Costello-ish chemistry with Goodman – while also spiking his material with the sharp, rat-a-tat-tat, anything-goes wit of a stand-up routine.