Monsters, Inc.

Monsters, Inc. is a 2001 American computer-animated comedy-adventure film directed by Pete Docter, released by Walt Disney Pictures on November 2, 2001, and the fourth film produced by Pixar Animation Studios. Co-directed by David Silverman, the film stars two monsters who work for a company named Monsters, Inc.: top scarer James P. Sullivan (voiced by John Goodman)—known as “Sulley”—and his one-eyed assistant, Mike Wazowski (voiced by Billy Crystal). Monsters generate their city’s power by scaring children, but they are terribly afraid themselves of being contaminated by children, so when one enters Monstropolis, Sulley finds his world disrupted.

Docter began developing the film in 1996 and wrote the story with Jill Culton, Jeff Pidgeon, and Ralph Eggleston. Fellow Pixar director Andrew Stanton wrote the screenplay with screenwriter Daniel Gerson. The characters went through many incarnations over the film’s five-year production process. The technical team and animators found new ways to render fur and cloth realistically for the film. Randy Newman, who composed Pixar’s three prior films, returned to compose their fourth.

Although the film suffered negative publicity in the form of two lawsuits against the filmmakers, filed by Lori Madrid and Stanley Mouse respectively, that were ultimately dismissed, Monsters, Inc. proved to be a major box office success from its release by Walt Disney Pictures on November 2, 2001, generating over $525,366,597 worldwide.^[1] In addition, the film received highly positive reviews from film critics and audiences, who praised both the humor and heart of the movie.

Monsters, Inc. will see a 3D re-release in theaters in 2012, followed by the release of a prequel, Monsters University, due in 2013.

Plot

Cover via Amazon

The parallel city of Monstropolis is inhabited by monsters and powered by the screams of children in the human world. At the Monsters Inc. factory, employees called “Scarers” venture into children’s bedrooms to scare them and collect their screams, using closet doors as portals. This is considered a dangerous task since the monsters believe children to be toxic and that touching them would be fatal. However, production is falling as children are becoming harder to scare and the company chairman Henry J. Waternoose III is determined to find a solution. The top Scarer is James P. “Sulley” Sullivan, who lives with his assistant Mike Wazowski and has a rivalry with the ever-determined chameleon-like monster Randall Boggs. During an ordinary day’s work on the “Scarefloor”, another scarer accidentally brings a child’s sock into the factory, causing the Children Detection Agency (CDA) to arrive and cleanse him. Mike is harassed by Roz the clerk for not completing his paperwork on time.

While working late at the factory, Sulley discovers that Randall left an activated door on the Scarefloor and a young girl (Mary Gibbs) who has entered the factory. He places her in his bag and hides when Randall arrives and returns the door to storage. Mike is at a restaurant on a date when Sulley comes to him for help, but chaos erupts when the girl is discovered into the restaurant. Sulley and Mike escape the CDA and take the girl home, discovering that she is not toxic after all. Sulley quickly grows attached to the girl and names her “Boo”. The next day, they smuggle her into the factory and Mike attempts to return her through her door. Randall tries to kidnap Boo, but kidnaps Mike by mistake.

In the basement, Randall reveals to Mike he has built a torture machine (“Scream Extractor”) to extract children’s screams, which would make the company’s current tactics redundant. Sulley stops Randall from experimenting the machine on Mike and reports him to Waternoose. However, Waternoose is revealed to be in allegiance with Randall and he exiles Mike and Sulley to the Himalayas. The two are taken in by the Abominable Snowman, who tells them they can return to the factory through the nearby village. Sulley heads out, but Mike refuses to follow him out of frustration. Sulley returns to the factory and rescues Boo from the Scream Extractor. Mike returns to apologise to Sulley and inadvertently helps Sulley defeat Randall in a fight.

Randall pursues Mike and Sulley as they race the factory and ride on the doors heading into storage, taking them into a giant vault where millions of closet doors are stored. Boo’s laughter activates the doors and allows the chase to pass in and out of the human world. After Randall nearly kills Sulley by pushing him out of an open door, Sulley and Mike trap him in the human world using a door to a trailer park.

They are finally able to access Boo’s door, but Waternoose and the CDA send it back to the Scarefloor. Mike distracts the CDA, while Sulley escapes with Boo and her door while Waternoose follows. Waternoose is tricked into confessing his plan to kidnap children in the simulation bedroom and is arrested by the CDA. The CDA’s leader is revealed to be Roz, who has been undercover for years trying to prove there was a scandal at Monsters Inc. Sulley and Mike say goodbye to Boo and return her home; on Roz’s orders Boo’s door is then destroyed. Sulley becomes the new chairman of Monsters Inc., and thanks to his experience with Boo, he comes up with a plan to end the company’s energy crisis.

Months later, Sulley’s leadership has changed the company’s workload. The monsters now enter children’s bedrooms to entertain them, since laughter is ten times more powerful than screams. Mike takes Sulley aside, revealing he has almost rebuilt Boo’s door, requiring only one more piece which Sulley took as a memento. Sulley enters and reunites with Boo.

Production

Development

The idea for Monsters, Inc. was conceived in a lunch in 1994 attended by John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft during the production of Toy Story.^[2] One of the ideas that came out of the brainstorming session was a film about monsters. “When we were making Toy Story“, Pete Docter claimed, “everybody came up to me and said that they totally believed that their toys came to life when they left the room. When Disney asked us to make more films, I wanted to tap into a child-like notion that was similar to Toy Story. I knew monsters were coming out of my closet when I was a kid. So I decided monsters would be appropriate”.^[3]

Docter’s initial concept for the film went through many changes, but the notion of monsters living in their own world was found by Docter as an appealing and workable one.^[4] Docter’s original idea revolved around a 30-year-old man dealing with monsters (which he drew in a book as a boy) coming back to bother him as an adult. Each monster represented a fear he had, and conquering those fears caused the monsters eventually to disappear.^[5]

Pete Docter began work on the film that would become Monsters, Inc. in 1996 while others focused on A Bug’s Life (1998) and Toy Story 2 (1999). Its code name was Hidden City, so named for Docter’s favorite restaurant in Point Richmond.^[6] By early February 1997, Docter had drafted a treatment together with Harley Jessup, Jill Culton, and Jeff Pidgeon that bore some resemblance to the final film. In that story, titled simply Monsters, the character of Sulley (known as this stage as Johnson) was an up-and-comer at his workplace, where his job was to scare children; his eventual sidekick, Mike Wazowski, had not yet been added.^[7]

Docter pitched the story to Disney with some initial artwork on February 4, 1997. He described Monsters as a buddy story between Johnson and a little girl, Mary.^[7] He and his story team left with some suggestions in hand and returned to pitch a refined version of the story on May 30, 1997. At this pitch meeting, longtime Disney animator Joe Grant—whose work stretched back to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)—suggested the title Monsters, Inc., which stuck.^[8]

The voice role of James P. “Sulley” Sullivan went to John Goodman, the longtime co-star of the comedy series Roseanne and a regular in the films of the Coen brothers. Goodman interpreted the character to himself as the monster equivalent of a National Football League player. “He’s like a seasoned lineman in the tenth year of his career,” he said at the time. “He is totally dedicated and a total pro.”^[9] Billy Crystal, having regretted turning down the part of Buzz Lightyear years prior, accepted that of Mike Wazowski, Sulley’s one-eyed best friend and scare assistant.^{[3][9][10][11]}

In November 2000, early in the production of Monsters, Inc., Pixar picked and moved for the second time since its Lucasfilm years.^[9] The company’s approximately 500 employees had become spread among three buildings, separated by a busy highway. The company moved from Point Richmond to a much bigger Emeryville campus, co-designed by Lasseter and Steve Jobs.^[9]

Writing

After Docter scrapped the initial concept of a 30-year-old terrified of monsters, the lead human character became a little boy for a while, and ultimately a little girl, named Mary.^[4][7] In a subsequent treatment on August 8, 1997, Mary became a fearless seven-year-old who had been toughened by years of teasing and pranks from four older brothers.^[8] Johnson, in contrast is nervous—nervous about the possibility of losing his job after the boss at Monsters, Inc. announces a downsizing is not he way. He feels envious because another scarer, Ned, is the top performer in the company.^[8]

As the story continued to develop, the central adult figure was changed to a child of varying ages (8-12) and gender. Ultimately, the story team decided that a young innocent girl would be the best counterpart for a furry 8-foot co-star.^[4] Boo was originally later planned to be aged six, but was changed to 3 years of age, because “The younger she was, she became the more dependent on Sulley,” Docter claimed.^[3]

Sulley and Boo went through radical changes as the story evolved between 1996 and 2000. Sulley went from a janitor, to a refinery worker, to a former scarer working in a refinery because an accident cost him his eyesight, to his final incarnation as the best scarer at Monsters, Inc.^[8] Boo developed into a domineering, out-of-control little girl—comparable to the kidnapped boy in O. Henry’s 1910 short story “The Ransom of Red Chief”—before becoming a mild, innocent, preverbal girl. After Boo became a girl, she continued to undergo changes, at one point being from Ireland and at another time to be Pixar’s first African-American character.^[8]

The idea of a monster buddy for the lead monster emerged at an April 6, 1998 “story summit” in Burbank with Disney and Pixar employees. The term coined by Lasseter, a “story summit” was a crash exercise that would yield a finished story in just two days.^[12] Such a character, the group agreed, was give the lead monster someone to talk to about his predicament. Docter named the character MIke for the father of his friend Frank Oz, a director and Muppet performer.^[8] Development artist Ricky Nierva drew a concept sketch of Wazowski that everyone was generally receptive to, and further drafts would include the character in a starring role.^[3]

Screenwriter Dan Gerson joined Pixar in 1999 and worked on the film for almost two years with the filmmakers on a daily basis. Gerson considered it his first experience writing a feature film. Dan Gerson explains; “I would sit with Pete and David Silverman and we would talk about a scene and they would tell me what they were looking for. I would make some suggestions and then go off and write the sequence. We’d get together again and review it and then hand it off to a story artist. Here’s where the collaborative process really kicked in. The board artist was not beholden to my work and could take liberties here and there. Sometimes I would suggest an idea about making the joke work better visually. Once the scene moved on to animation, the animators would plus the material even further.”^[4]

Animation

In production, Monsters Inc. differed from earlier Pixar features in that each main character had its own lead animator: John Kahrs on Sulley, Andrew Gordon on Mike, and Dave DeVan on Boo.^[13] Kahrs found that the “bearlike quality” of Goodman’s voice provided an exceptionally good fit with the character. He faced a difficult challenge, however, in dealing with Sulley’s sheer mass; traditionally, animators conveyed a figure’s heaviness by giving it a slower, more belabored movement, but Kahrs was concerned that such an approach to a central character would give the film a sluggish feel.^[13] Like Goodman, Kahrs came to think of Sulley as a football player, one whose athleticism enabled him to move quickly in spite of his size. To help the animators with Sulley and other large monsters, Pixar arranged for Rodger Kram, an expert at Berkeley, on the locomotion of heavy mammals, to come in and lecture on the subject.^[13]

Sulley was originally planned to have tentacles for feet, however, this caused many problems in early animation tests. The idea was later largely rejected, as it was thought the audience would commonly look at the tenticles rather than Sullivan’s face.^[14] Sullivan was also planned to wear glasses throughout the film, which was conceived by the directors at one point, but the creators found it a dangerous idea and it was rejected as well, because they found the eyes were a perfectly readable and clear way of personally expressing the eyes of a character.^[14]

The first fur test was with Sullivan running an obstacle course. Results were not sastifactory, as fur would get caught by objects and stretch the fur out because of the extreme amount of motion. Another simillar test was also unsuccessful with the fur going through the objects.^[14] Jeff Pidgeon and Jason Katz story-boarded a test in which Mike was helping Sulley choose a tie for work and Mike Wazowski soon became a vital character in the movie.^[3] Originally Mike had no arms, and had to use his legs as appendages, however due to technical difficulties arms were soon added.^[3]

Adding to Sulley’s lifelike appearance was an intense effort by the technical team to refine the rendering of fur. Other production houses had tackled realistic fur, most notably Rhythm & Hues in its 1993 polar bear commercials for Coca-Cola and in its talking animals’ faces in Babe (1995).^[13] Monsters, Inc., however, required fur on a far larger scale. From the standpoint of Pixar’s engineers, the quest for fur posed several significant challenges. One was figuring out how to render the huge numbers of hairs—2,320,413 on Sulley—in a reasonably efficient way.^[13] Another was making sure the hairs cast shadows on other hairs. Without self-shadowing, fur or hair takes on an unrealistic flat-colored look (The hair on Andy’s toddler sister, as seen in the opening sequence of Toy Story, is an example of hair without self-shadowing.)^[13] The fur simulation techniques became part of a new program called Fizt (for “physics tool”).^[15]

After a shot with Sulley had been animated, Fizt took the data for the shot and added his fur, taking into account his movements as well as the effects of wind and gravity. The Fitz program also controlled movement on clothing, which provided another breakthrough.^[15] The deceptively simple-sounding task of animating cloth meant solving the complex problem of how to keep cloth untangled—that is, how to keep it from passing through itself when parts of it intersect.^[16][17]

Michael Kass, senior scientist at Pixar, was joined on Monsters, Inc. by David Baraff and Andrew Witkin and developed an algorithm they called “global intersection analysis” to handle cloth-to-cloth collisions. The complexity of the shots in Monsters, Inc.—including elaborate sets such as the door vault—required more computing power to render than any of Pixar’s earlier efforts combined. The render farm in place for Monsters Inc. was made up of 3500 Sun Microsystems processors, compared with 1400 for Toy Story 2 and only 200 for Toy Story.^[16]

Release

The film was theatrically released on November 2, 2001 in the United States, in Australia on December 26, 2001, and in the United Kingdom on February 8, 2002. It was released on VHS and DVD on September 17, 2002,^[18] and on Blu-ray on November 10, 2009.^[19] After the success of the 3D re-release of The Lion King,^[20] Disney and Pixar announced a 3D re-release of Monsters, Inc. for December 19, 2012^[21] (originally a January 18, 2013 release). In addition, the film’s prequel, Monsters University, will be also released in the 3-D format.