4. Monsters Inc (2001) VS Shrek (2001)
These two films have admittedly less in common with one another than the last two, but they both came out in the same year and both revolve around a giant, lovable brightly colored "monster". Monsters Inc is another example of a film a lot of people forget to love when they think of Pixar. Because of recent films such as Wall-e and Up and how much they loved them, people forget that arguably Pixar's earliest films were actually a little better?- my opinion. The thing I loved about the early days of Pixar was the fact that the creators took ideas we all thought about as children, "What if our toys were real?", "What is Monster's lived in our closets?" and brought them to magnificent life on screen. Adults and children alike could enjoy these films because they could either relive their childhood fantasies or for the children, be encouraged to explore their imaginations and let it take them where ever they wanted to go. In Pixar's early days, the films had a little bit more fun than they tend to do now. Monsters Inc is a wonderful film. John Goodman and Billy Crystal are fantastic in their roles and bring great life and comedy to their characters. The whole film is a visual feats of colors and creatures than you can't help but fall in love with immediately, and the concept that monsters need children's screams for energy like we need oil is one of Pixar's finest. All this said, I still will have to give this one to Dreamworks. Shrek may look less fantastical, and may even arguably be a little less imaginative and slightly more conventional, but that film really is one of the greatest animation films of all time, and in my opinion places above Monsters Inc. Whereas many people consider Monsters Inc the more forgettable Pixar movie, Shrek is arguably THE Dreamworks movie and finally was enough to get Pixar a little scared. Despite the fact that Rotten Tomatoes places Shrek slightly lower down the chart than Monsters Inc, lets not forget that Shrek beat MI at the Academy Awards and won the first ever Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Shrek was the more touching and more human film. We could emphasize with the main characters more than we could with any character in Monsters Inc and because of this we were overall more invested in Shrek's journey and therefore the film. And as funny as Billy Crystal is in the film, Eddie Murphy as Donkey is unbeatable.