The Making of Monsters Inc

The Making of Monsters, Inc

 

Cast

Sully is voiced by John Goodman. John was chosen by Pete Docter, the director, because he thought that John was the embodiment of Sulley, a warm and loveable monster.

Mike is voiced by Billy Crystal. Billy jumped at the chance to voice Mike because he had been offered the role of voicing Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story film, but foolishly turned the role down. Billy regretted this decision as soon as he saw Toy Story and from then on he knew he would accept any role Pixar was offering. Billy has gone on to say that Mike is his most favourite character he’s ever played.

 

When Billy was brought in to voice Mike he wanted to do a lot of improvising, put his own spin on the character but he couldn’t do that because John had already voiced his lines so they asked John back to see if they could voice their lines together and because Johns such a lovely guy he agreed. Personally, I think this should be done more because in the cases where actors have worked together, you always get more witty dialogue, like Timon and Pumbaa.

 

 

Boo is voiced by Mary Gibbs. Mary’s father worked at Pixar, he was a storyboard artist for Monsters, Inc and one day they were looking for a child who could come in and the animators could draw and have some voice work done. Marys father, Rob, suggested his 2 year old daughter Mary. She came in with pig tails and the animators drew her to get an idea of what the child could look like and sound like. In most cases the actor or actress coming in to be referenced wouldn’t be picked up but this time it stuck. Mary was very comfortable seeing as this was her dads work and work colleagues. To get the voice recordings of Mary they followed her around the sound studio and recorded just any sounds she made. To get her to chat they showed her different puppets.

Later when they were making” Inside Out” Pixar used Mary’s voice for the scenes when Riley’s really young.

 

Randall is voiced by Steve Buscemi.

 

Waternoose is voiced by James Coburn.

 

Celia is voiced by Jennifer Tilly.

 

Roz is voiced by Bob Peterson, yes the female Roz is voiced by the male Bob Peterson who is a Pixar employee.

 

Yeti is voiced by John Ratzenberger. John has voiced a character in every single Pixar film ever released because he is Pixar’s good luck charm. He’s voiced Hamm in the Toy Story films, Underminer in The Incredibles, John in Wall-E and so on.

 

Fungus, Randal’s sidekick, is voiced by Frank Oz. Frank is a very successful voice actors having voiced many favourite characters. He has voiced Yoda in the Star Wars movies, Miss Piggy from The Muppets and Cookie Monster from Sesame Street.

 

Needleman and Smitty, the two teenage monsters who are fan boys of Sulley are voiced by Daniel Gerson.

 

George Sanderson, the monster that gets shaved is voiced by Samuel Lord Black.

 

Film Development

Pete Docter came up with idea for the films because of the thought when you’re a child that there is a monster living in your closet. From there the idea grew into the film it is today.

 

When they were designing Mike and Sulley, Mike didn’t originally have arms and Sulley was shorter, had tentacles, and was more of a brown and mauve colour and his fur is long and straight. They decided very early that the tentacles weren’t a good idea because they noticed that audiences eyes were drawn to the tentacles too much and it was too distracting. It was also considered putting glasses on Sulley however Pixar artists know that audiences look at the eyes to better understand the character and if a barrier is there like glasses then audiences aren’t going to connect with him.

When it was decided that Sulley would be hairy, the team at Pixar needed to do a lot of research and try out lots of different tests to see if it was possible to make a realistic looking hairy monster. The team at Pixar made something called “The Hairball model” which is exactly what it sounds like. On computers they created a ball of hair and then they put it through different tests, like shaking it up and down. They wanted to see how the hair in the CGI programme would react. Then they made the hair wet to see how that would change the look and feel of the hair. They did this again and again using different kinds of hair, for example it might be dirty hair, long or short, made of different textures and so on. This process straightened out a lot of kinks, excuse my hairlarious pun.

Taking all the knowledge from the Hairball Model they applied their findings to creating Sulley. He went through similar tests but also more advanced tests, for example what would happen to the hair when Sulley is holding something, like Boo for example, or what would happen when he’s running or getting covered in snow. One of the tests was to create an assault course for Sulley in the computer where he comes into contact with different objects and saw how his body and his fur would react. There is a video of you tube called “Monsters, Inc. – CGI making of (2001)” and it showcases the creation of Sulley and his hair.

 

Creating the scene where Sulley is covered in snow was the hardest and lots of the people in special effects were pushing back saying this is impossible, however they didn’t give up and the scene is in the film exactly how they imagined it, if not better. So now if there’s ever a scene that seems impossible to do it’s referred to as “Yeti’s Cave”.

It wasn’t just Sulley that they needed to animate, it was hundreds of monsters. All of the creatures are individual and they’re made to look like they’re made out of different materials and have different textures. For example Sulley is really fluffy, Randal is scaly, Waternoose is made out of a hard bone material and they needed to translate this. A lot of background monsters were created when they used the Hair Ball simulation.

 

The events of 9/11 took place 60 days before the film was going to be released. Everyone at Pixar were thinking about the ones effected, of course, but they were also thinking about whether anyone would actually go and see their film, or any film in the aftermath of something like 9/11. Pixar understood the need for sensitivity and so because of 9/11 they changed one of the scenes in there film. Originally after Boo had been spotted at Harry Hausens and Mike and Sulley are on the run and Mike says “That couldn’t have gone any worse” the Sushi building behind them was going to blow up with a mushroom cloud, but they thought this might be too insensitive so instead the sushi restaurant is covered with a giant force field.

 

Easter Eggs

Normally with Pixar films whenever a new film is released like Monsters Inc, they will put Easter Eggs relating to their next film in the movie. The next movie after Monsters Inc is Finding Nemo. Did you spot anything fishy? Well if you look at the paintings on the wall behind the sushi cutting octopus chef you’ll see a painting of a clown fish. Coincidence? I think not.

In Boo’s room there are lots of Easter eggs. Another Finding Nemo related one is that Boo hands Sulley a Nemo cuddly toy along with a Jessie doll. There is also a Luxo ball on the floor.

 

When Mike and Sulley go to work they walk past a cafe called “Hidden City Cafe”. This is a reference to a real life cafe that could be found in California near Pixar’s headquarters and it was frequented several times by Pixar executives like Pete Docter. In fact Pete has said that the first idea for the name of the film was going to be “Hidden City”.

 

When Randall gets his comeuppance and is sent into the human world, he lands in a trailer, this is the same trailer we see in A Bugs Life. Next to this trailer is the Pizza Planet truck which has appeared in almost all of the Pixar films.

 

Release, Reception and Awards

One of the trailers to promote the release of this film saw Mike and Sulley playing charades. Sulley is trying to act out Harry Potter and Mike just has no idea. It’s a funny trailer.

 

As I’ve already mentioned, Monsters, Inc came out not long after 9/11 and although they had their fears that the timing was bad this didn’t stop people from coming to see the film and not only that but enjoying the film.

IMDB gives the film an 8.0 out of 10. What do you think of the film? Let me know in the comments bellow. Personally, this is one of my least favourite Pixar films. I just don’t like the concept or identify with monsters. However I think I’m in the minority and I’m okay with that.

 

The film won an Academy Award for Best Original Song for “If I Didn’t Have You” which was written by Randy Newman, the same genius behind “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” from Toy Story.

The film has also won a BAFTA for Best Feature Film.

 

That covers everything about the Making of Monsters, Inc, come back on Monday 25th May for another blog.

Inside Out

Inside Out

or

The Untitled Pixar Movie that Takes You Inside the Mind

or

State of Mind

or

Down in the Dumps

or

HQ!

 

Plot

Inside Out enters you into the mind of 11 year old Riley and introduced you to her 5 emotions, Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust. Riley and her family move from their hometown of Minnesota to the scary San Francisco and after losing her hometown friends and having to leave her hockey team behind Riley is finding it hard to settle into her new life. This causes Sadness to step forward which is something Joy will not allow.

 

The Spark of an Idea

The idea for the story of Inside Out came from the mind of Pete Docter, who has worked at Disney since its creation. He was watching his daughter Ellie, voice of young Ellie from Up, mature. He noticed how her care free, loud and happy behaviour was becoming a lot quieter and reserved. Pete wondered what on earth was going through his daughters head and so Pete created this character of Riley, delving into her mind to try and work out how thought and emotions work.

Another way this film is related to Pete Docter is because his family had to move from Minnesota to California and had to leave behind his ice hockey days.

 

Development

Originally it wasn’t going to be Sadness and Joy who became separated from Headquarters, it was going to be Fear and Joy because this seemed like it would be a funnier pairing. This teaming was changed to Joy and Sadness because one day Pete Docter, the director, went for a walk where for some reason he started thinking about some negative thoughts like he was going to lose his job which would cause him to lose his friends. This came with the revelation that you can’t always be happy, sometimes you do need to feel sad.

When deciding to embark upon this idea for a film there were a lot of things that needed to be discussed and decided on. One of these things were: how many emotions should there be? After a lot of research and conversations with neuroscientists, child psychologists, psychiatrists, and prestigious psychologists like Paul Ekman who taught them all about his study into the relationship between emotions and facial expressions. Pixar also looked at the work of Dr. Robert Plutchik. From all of this research they considered around 25 emotions. The problem was this was too many characters to keep in headquarters and would become too confusing and the emotions overlapped one another so they narrowed it down to 5. Some of the emotions that got cut were surprise, pride, logic and trust.

To remind the audience that you are in fact meant to be inside Riley’s mind, one of the things that the design team did was have the railing of the pathways be in the shape of DNA strands, there are also cell shapes put indented into the walls.

The inspiration for the contraption that the memory balls travel along are from George Rhoades’s “Kinetic Ball Sculpture”. Pixar also went to an egg farm, yes you did read that right, to see how they delicately sort eggs and what machines they went through. Pixar applied what they saw there to how the memory balls would travel around Riley’s mind.

 

Cut it Out

It won’t be a surprise to you that not all of the ideas the creators have make their way into the movie. One of the ideas that had to be cut was the face and names department which was just going to be a scene explaining that the reason why you can never remember people’s names is because the people down in this department don’t get along so they can never match the names up. It was meant to be a quick comedic scene but it didn’t have a space in the film sadly.

Riley’s family dynamic has gone through some changes, for example Riley was going to have a sibling and a pet in the story but they were both removed because when Riley begins to develop depression they wanted the audience to focus on her and make her feel look as though she is alone. Having a sibling and or a pet would have allowed Riley to feel as though she was going through this transition of moving with someone, rather than doing it on her own. Including one or both of these additions to the story would make it harder for Riley to feel isolated and make it harder for the audience to see a logical reason why Riley would have become depressed.

Another scrapped concept was a much darker story line that would have shown Riley, around the age of 8, going to play in the woods when she get knocked out by a low hanging branch. A result of this was that Riley would suffer with short term memory loss and the bulk of the story would be the emotions trying to get the memories back. The reason why this idea was scrapped was because it seemed too much of a negative storyline.

A further idea that they had was going to have Riley transported inside of her mind so she could interact with her emotions and this sounds like a really interesting concept to me, but trying to work out a way that this would seem logical and possible, even for an animated feature, was just too much of a leap that they realised this idea wasn’t going to work. This is also the reason why the scrapped the idea of Joy being able to visit the real world.

 

Characters

For 8 months Joy went through a process where she shimmers with pixels and this was done to remind the audience that they are not humans, they are emotions and so have a different physical make up. The idea was going to be dropped due to expense and how time consuming it was. The problem is that when John Lassiter saw a clip with the shimmer on it, he liked it and wanted to keep it and add it to all the emotions. This was a massive inconvenience and it nearly ruined the budget, but after a bit of time and tweaking they managed to complete the task within budget and without taking an extra few years to complete the film.

 

Joy , voiced by Amy Poehler, is based on a star and an explosion and because she shines so brightly, unlike the other emotions, doesn’t have a shadow.

 

Sadness, who is based on an upside down teardrop, is voiced by Phyllis Smith. She was chosen for this role because Jonas Rivera, who is a producer at Pixar, saw her acting in Bad Teacher and thought she would be great for the role of Sadness.

Sadness, who for a long time was going to be called Misty, was first designed to wear pyjamas all the time, but instead it was chosen that she would wear an oversized jumper so that it looked like she could hide in it.

 

Anger, who was going to be named Ira, was voiced by Lewis Black who was Pixar’s first and only choice for Anger. When Pixar pitched the idea to him they sent along a list of some of the other Pixar films they had produced, that they weren’t sure Lewis knew about, or knew were Pixar’s creation. Lewis took this gesture as Pixar thinking he was crazy or a recluse. Obviously Lewis accepted the role and it is because of him that Anger looks the way he does, let me explain. They knew Lewis from his work on “The Daily Show” where he wears a suit and a tie and that is what Pixar decided to dress the fire brick shaped Anger in. He is also almost always reading or carrying a newspaper (that reads headlines relating to things going on in Riley’s day like “RILEY QUITS HOCKEY!”) because it is Lewis’s job to discuss newsworthy items on “The Daily Show”.

 

Disgust, who was going to be named Nadia, was voiced by Mindy Kaling. Mindy has stated in an interview that when she was proposed the idea of her character and the premise of the movie, she tiered up thinking about the message this film would be sending young people which Pixar took to mean that they were on the right track and that the audience watching the film would be able to understand the theme they wanted to present.

Before they settled on Mindy as the voice of Disgust, the crew weren’t entirely sure how her character should (triple dent gum) look. For a long time she was a boy who looked very ugly, ironic right? When they found Mindy and she gave her portrayal of Disgust they knew she had to be a girl and decided to continue being ironic by making her shape be reminiscent of broccoli.

 

Fear, who was going to be called Freddie, was designed to look similar to a raw nerve. He was voiced by Bill Hader and he is the only emotion who has voiced another character for Pixar. He voiced a referee and slug in Monsters Inc.

Bill has been a long time Pixar fan. For example, shortly before landing the role of Fear, Bill, on his way home, stopped off at Pixar and asked for a tour. This isn’t something Pixar usually accepts to do, however for Bill, they made an exception. Of course when asked to voice a character Bill couldn’t say no, he also couldn’t say no when Pixar offered Bill the chance to do some writing for the film. Bill helped out with the Dream Productions sequence.

 

Riley was voiced by two different people. Young Riley was voiced by Mary Gibbs, the voice of Boo from Monsters Inc. They recycled some of the dialogue they had already recorded and used that. Coincidently, when you can hear Mary as Riley, she has bunches in her hair, which is the same hairstyle Boo had.

The second person who voiced Riley when she is older was Kaitlyn Dias who was never meant to be the final voice, she was put in as the scratch test, which is basically the voice you use just to see how it is all going to sound before you get in the real voice actor, however the producers liked her portrayal of Riley and decided to keep her.

It is important to note that Riley’s chief emotion is Joy, in comparison to her Dad’s whose is Anger (voice by Pete Docter) and Mum’s whose is Sadness. This shows that depending on which emotion is in charge, that is the emotion that the person is most likely to lean towards.

As Riley progresses through the film she is also progressing into the stages of depression, this is reflected inside her mind but also on the outside by her behaviour and clothing choices. Riley as a child is seen wearing very colourful clothing, as she then grows up and becomes depressed her clothing choice darkens.

 

Bing Bong, one of the best imaginary friends in the world, was voiced by Richard Kind. This isn’t the first time Richard has worked for Pixar, he was Hoppers brother Molt in A Bugs Life. He has also voiced the bookworm in Toy Story 3.

By the time it came for Bing Bong to voice his line “take her to the moon for me” Richard was already tearing up and therefore it took a couple of goes to get it right. I don’t blame him, that scene is a tear jerker.

Some of the other looks for Bing Bong that they decided against were him having a curly pig tale, chicken wings and dog ears. Bing Bong ended up being made out of cotton candy, cat, elephant and dolphin.

Bing Bong wasn’t going to be the only imaginary friend in the film. There was also going to be a scribble friend, the generic drawing of a person every child does and a sunshine that is only a quarter, you know the one you draw in the top corner of your page. All of these out of work imaginary friends were going to live in Hobo Camp. However these were removed and Bing Bong became the only imaginary friend to be seen in the film.

 

Riley’s parents are not named in the film other than Mum and Dad, nevertheless on the mothers credit card the name written is K. Ann Anderson. Although if you read the Inside Out essential guide, it states that Mum and Dad’s names are Jill and Bill Anderson.

 

Premiere

Inside Out premiered at the Cannes film festival and at the end of the showing it received an 8 minute standing ovation. However when Inside Out was released, so too was Jurassic World which was so successful at the box office it pushed Inside Out to the number 2 slot. This was the first time in Pixar history that one of their films did this, however by its third week of release Inside Out did reach the number 1 slot. This fact didn’t stop Inside Out having the second largest opening weekend in Pixar history, after Toy Story 3.

It’s success continued as the weeks of its release went on. For example Inside Out was made with a budget of $175,000,000 and was able to gross a total of a little over $792,000,000 as of Oct 2015. That is an amazing accomplishment and a huge success for Pixar.

 

Regional Viewing

Depending on where you view this film will depend on what scene you witness and how the film was advertised to you. I will first explain the advertising. In North America, the poster showed all of the emotions in a non gender specific head, this was done to not bias towards male or females, however in Europe and South America, the head is that of a girls.

Now onto viewing. In America the father will daydream about Hockey at the dinner table, however if you are in the UK, the father will daydream about soccer.

Similarly, if you are in Asia, Riley will be disgusted at being forced to eat green peppers, everywhere else she is disgusted at eating broccoli. It’s important to note though that in both instances the parents are eating pizza as well as their side or broccoli or green pepper. Little bit unfair don’t you think?

In countries where you speak Hebrew, Bing Bong spells out the word Danger from right to left , in comparison to countries like America and the U.K where it is spelt out from left to right. I will note here that Bing Bongs illiteracy is not from stupidity but because Riley herself couldn’t read when she created him.

 

Awards

Inside Out has been very successful, so successful that it won an Oscar for the Best Animated Feature Film of the Year. It also won a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture in the Animation category. It won a Best Vocal Ensemble in a Feature award and about 50 more awards for various accomplishments.

 

Easter Eggs

There are so many Easter eggs in this film I am going to admit now that I don’t think it’s possible for me to list them all, nevertheless, I’m going to do my best to point out all of the major ones.

Let’s first start with the scene where Riley is in the car with her parents driving to San Francisco. She and her family drive past an open field which has electrical lines in the background. If your quick you will see a line of birds, these are the birds from the Pixar short “For the Birds”.

When Riley is very young and running around her house on the coffee table of the sitting room/living room there is a magazine and on the front cover is a picture of Collette Tatou from Ratatouille. Also in the young scenes of Riley when she is playing with Bing Bong you might notice the Luxo ball. When Riley has a bad dream on her first night of being in her new house, a bear comes to deliver her pizza. This bear resembles the mother bear from Brave, also, a lot of people have assumed that the rat in this dream is Remy, I don’t agree with this though, I think it’s just a rat.

In Riley’s classroom, at the back of the room there is a world map with lots of pins. These pins point to the location of all the Pixar films so far.

When Riley is chatting on video chat to one her friends, one of the name in her contact list is “Doc Pete” a reference to Pete Docter.

The ever present A113 can be seen in graffiti on a wall in San Francisco when Riley is running away and stops to receive a call from her parents in the street.

Pete Docter has said that there are 3 Pizza Planet trucks in this film, I have found none of them, however compilations of the Easter eggs you can find in Inside Out on You Tube have shown me that one Pizza planet truck is in one of the memory balls when Joy first finds Bing Bong and he tries to run away.

John Ratzenberger, Pixar’s good luck charm, has voiced a character in every single Pixar film to date. In Inside Out John voices construction worker/builder, who at the end of the film fits the new and updated control panel. There are actually few things to notice about the control panel as you watch the film. The first is that as Riley grows up, the control panel becomes bigger and has a lot more buttons. If you look at Mum and Dad’s control panels, all of their emotions have a (triple dent gum) seat and space to work together at the control panel, this is hopefully what Riley’s control panel will turn into when she gains more maturity and understanding over her emotions. The second thing to notice is that whenever an emotion takes control at the panel, it becomes tinted with that emotions colour. Last but not least, there is a hidden Mickey in the control panel.

When heading into Imagination Land you can see lots of board games stalked upon one another. One of which is called “Find Me” and has a cartoon of a clown fish. This is obviously a reference to Finding Nemo. There is also a “Dinosaur World” board game which could be a reference to “The Good Dinosaur”. Talking about Dinosaurs, in the flash back of a happy memory that Riley has, the dinosaur tail that Riley’s family car drives into the back of looks a lot like Arlo from “The Good Dinosaur”. You can also see a picture of Figment from Epcot in Walt Disney World.

Also in Imagination Land the house of cards you can see are personalised to Riley. Dad is the King, Mum is the Queen and Riley is replacing the Joker.

 

Plot Hole

The recall tube is what has allowed the workers in long term memory to continuously send up the triple dent gum tune, (eurgh) which begs the question, why didn’t Joy just send the core memories back up through the recall tube. Pete and the rest of the Pixar team have discussed this and have decided that the reason Joy didn’t use the recall tube is because she wouldn’t have trusted anyone else with the memory’s. Joy wants to be the one who is in charge.

 

Bits and Bobs

“Yeast of Edin” is the name of the Pizza place Riley and her mum went to, to get pizza. This is a reference to a real life Pizza place. The quirk of this place is that it only serves one kind of Pizza at a time, and yes it does serve broccoli topped pizza.

Some title names that were discarded were Joyless, Trouble in Mind, Life of Riley and Out of Our Mind.

The films dedication at the end says “This film is dedicated to our kids, please don’t grow up, ever.”

I really hoped you enjoy this blog. Inside Out is one of my most favourite Pixar films and I really enjoyed learning all these new facts and I hope you did too.