PETE DOCTER: Hi, I'm Pete Docter, the director of Monsters, Incorporated.
Welcome to the commentary on the DVD.
ANDREW STANTON: Hi, I'm Andrew Stanton,
and I'm screenwriter and co-executive producer.
JOHN LASSETER: Hi, I'm John Lasseter. I'm executive producer.
LEE UNKRICH: And I'm Lee Unkrich, co-director of Monsters, Inc.
And welcome.
LASSETER: Even though Monsters, Incorporated is Pixar's fourth film,
its origins start back even before our first film, Toy Story.
Toy Story was the first computer animated feature film
and Pixar's first feature.
And Andrew and Pete and I,
along with Joe Ranft, developed the story of that.
So one of the things I loved about working on Toy Story was
how many friends came up to me and said,
"I totally believed that my toys came to life when I wasn't in the room."
And I was looking around for other things like that
that we all experienced as a kid, a sort of a shared experience.
So, I knew that monsters lived in my closet
and were coming out to scare me at night,
so I figured a lot of other people felt that way, too.
DOCTER: The purpose of the title sequence here
is basically to set the tone of the film.
Without it, we actually had an earlier version
where we start right in on the kid asleep in bed,
and it becomes a much more spooky, dark, kind of scary tone
that we're laying down.
With the title sequence, we're hoping to tell people,
"This is gonna be fun. It's gonna be colorful and upbeat."
Geefwee Boedoe had designed it
and also animated it along with Patrick Siemer.
LASSETER: What we always try to look for at Pixar
is an idea, a story or subject matter that really connects with the audience,
that the audience can relate to.
We kind of call it our foundation with the audience.
Something that they go, "Yeah, I know that,"
or, "That happened to me as a kid."
But then we show it to them in a way that they've never thought of before.
DOCTER: Growing up, I had this idea that the way animated films were made
was that one night Walt would just sit upright in bed and say, "Dumbo,"
and from that point on it was just a matter of doing what was in his brain.
This is not anywhere near the truth.
These films really begin with an idea, and then they change and they grow
and they evolve into something stronger and better.
So, in this film, we boarded and re-boarded dozens of scenes,
you know, dozens of times, as is the case on all our films,
but this one sequence was somewhat of an exception.
We boarded it early on.
Nate Stanton, who's one of our top story guys on the show, boarded this,
and it was the first in production.
UNKRICH: Yeah, this is the very first scene that we animated.
DOCTER: Pretty much unchanged.
And his boards matched very closely...
UNKRICH: Although ironically, while this was
the very first scene to go into animation,
it was actually the very last scene, pretty much, to get completed,
because we added the whole idea of the monster freaking out
and destroying the room kind of at the 11th hour.
DOCTER: Yeah. Yeah.
It was initially that it ended right about here
where the monster raises up, the kid screams,
- and the lights went on... Yeah. - UNKRICH: Right at this point.
DOCTER: And that was it.
And what we found was that people were really identifying with the kid.
So we needed something to get back at the monster
- and turn the tables. - UNKRICH: Yeah.
Again, it was a way to, like the title sequence, to say,
"Yeah, we just scared you a little bit,"
"but, no, this is gonna be a really funny movie."
DOCTER: Right. So it really reinforces one of the key concepts
that monsters are actually scared of kids.
This sequence here was a real bugger. We must've re-boarded it like 80 times.
We even changed it again after we'd finished animating it.
UNKRICH: It was really hard to set up this world
without being too expositional.
This is a world no one's ever seen before,
and we wanted to get across a lot of ideas really, really quickly
about the rules of the world, that the monsters were afraid of kids
and that there's an energy crisis.
We were constantly playing this game of
how much information is too much information,
and at the same time we wanted people to know what was going on.
Bonnie Hunt plays Flint,
the red kind of woman behind the console,
and she used to actually have a much bigger part in the film,
but in the course of developing the story
she ended up getting cut back, unfortunately,
because we love working with Bonnie
and she always brings so much to the characters.
LASSETER: We came up with the idea
that the reason monsters go in to kids' rooms and scare them
is they collect the scream. The kids, when they see a monster, they scream.
They collect that and they refine it into a clean, efficient fuel.
It's the fossil fuel of monster world.
DOCTER: That was something that Andrew really brought in your first draft.
STANTON: The scream thing just fit so well and had such visual potential,
and it was fun.
DOCTER: And then we really got to capitalize on the work situation,
the fact that there's these slobbery, snarly beasts
that clock in and clock out every day.
DOCTER: Sulley's introduction was another tricky thing
that we went over and over on.
The original introduction was just him
(IMITATING SULLEY) roaring into the camera.
UNKRICH: Right, we jumped, kind of, right into the exercise montage.
DOCTER: And then at the 11th hour, Bob Peterson, our head of story,
had this idea for the radio announcer. I think it works really great.
You get the reverse of Sulley having this big buildup from Waternoose,
he's confident, tough and so on, and then he's asleep.
Plus, you get Mike as a radio announcer,
which tells us a lot about his character,
guy who plays jokes, he always has something to say.
And it also gave Billy Crystal a chance to play around a little bit.
UNKRICH: Right.
DOCTER: Here with the exercise, we needed something
to pick up the pace after all that exposition and the sleeping,
as well as to tell us about Sulley and Mike as characters, who they are.
Besides being roommates and total scare fanatics,
this is the first thing they do in the morning.
They hop into exercise.
UNKRICH: This is also our first glimpse at the really cool architecture
that was created for the film, the design of the film.
DOCTER: The commercial coming up here is
a great way to sell even more exposition
that we needed to tell the audience about,
hopefully in a way that makes them laugh and be entertained, as well.
UNKRICH: We tried to make it like a cheesy infomercial.
DOCTER: (CHUCKLES) Yeah. Yeah.
We patterned it on all those wonderfully hokey
power and energy commercials that you see.
And we really approached it as though we were selling a real company.
A lot of us did commercials professionally at Pixar
before we started on features, so we had some experience there.
UNKRICH: So we tried to make this as awkwardly produced as possible.
(DOCTER LAUGHING)
DOCTER: We found this great announcer, Jim Thornton,
who we felt had this great, sort of,
almost a '50s retro quality to his voice and real authentic.
That image in the corner there of the kid being scared
is an image that we, as animators, see on our screens.
UNKRICH: Kind of like what the animation looks like
when it doesn't have any lighting or shaders or anything on it.
DOCTER: Yeah.
So as we started to develop the story and the characters,
for Sullivan we needed someone with great strength
and somebody who could be like the star quarterback
but also a sensitivity and warmth to him.
And as we hit on John Goodman that just seemed perfect.
He has this real gruffness to his voice and a strength.
For Mike, Billy Crystal was, again, as we thought of him, was perfect.
He's got this real upbeat, bubbly,
sort of a Burgess Meredith-type character...
UNKRICH: Right, and we knew we'd get a ton out of him
in terms of improvisation, which is always great in animation.
Since we do the voices before the animation,
we can just let the actors cut loose and come up with great stuff,
and that always just really livens up the animation
and makes for some great performance.
DOCTER: We actually approached Billy
to do the voice of Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story
way back when, and he turned us down.
And then we went on to hire Tim Allen, who did an amazing job.
But Billy was telling us he was kicking himself ever since
for turning that down.
DOCTER: The city here, you can see,
was really one of the most challenging sets in the film.
We wanted it to look really rich and detailed,
but we didn't have a whole lot of time, screen time,
so we couldn't justify spending tons of time to build it.
UNKRICH: So the whole thing ended up getting
built really like a Hollywood backlot
in terms of, you know, there's not a whole lot of city that was actually built
but we really tried to maximize the use of it.
STANTON: Tony, the Italian grocer here,
we knew we wanted an Italian voice,
and we had some actors do kind of a put-on Italian accent,
but it just wasn't making us laugh.
DOCTER: So we got one of our technical directors here, Guido Quaroni,
who's actually Italian,
and he actually did some of the more amazing effects work in the film.
Ted's roar here was originally
a big loud roar from a famous movie monster,
whom I won't mention here.
We weren't able to get the rights to it.
So instead we went the opposite way and put in this chicken.
I think it really works. Yeah.
LASSETER: (LAUGHING) We think it's funny.
UNKRICH: It's just kind of bizarre.
DOCTER: As we come into the lobby here
we wanted it to have a grand, sort of institutional feel to it.
Big tile paintings seemed like a logical choice.
UNKRICH: Just as a general design philosophy, it's great.
I mean, Pete and I are both huge fans of, kind of, that culture
and architecture and the look of the early 1960s.
I think it's really cool that it permeates this film.
DOCTER: So the geeks here, Needleman and Smitty are their names
that we've referred to them,
they're voiced by Dan Gerson, a writer on the show.
He, of course, wrote all their lines, too.
It was basically a case of...
He did the scratch, the temporary dialog that we just work with,
- and we fell in love with it. - UNKRICH: Yeah.
It's becoming a pattern here at Pixar.
Like more and more people who just work at Pixar
who do the scratch voices end up just making us crack up,
and we use them in the film.
DOCTER: Celia here, Harley Jessup, our production designer,
came up with this idea of using snakes for hair,
you know, basically pulling from Medusa.
And we experimented with the idea that
Mike sees all of her old boyfriends all turned to stone,
which puts the pressure on him rather to behave,
but it didn't fit and it was kind of unappealing for her character.
UNKRICH: Jennifer Tilly does Celia's voice, and she's just such a sweetheart
and just brings such great character to Celia.
DOCTER: So early on we had been recording, which is fairly typical,
each of the actors on their own, Billy Crystal, John Goodman.
And the film really called for them to be best friends since kindergarten,
and they just know each other so well
that I had the idea to bring them both in, both the actors at the same time.
UNKRICH: To record in a session together in the same room,
- which wasn't typical. - DOCTER: Right.
And that really gave us a lot of spontaneity.
They improv'd. They just brought everything,
the energy level up. It was really great.
This is Randall's introduction here.
We wanted something that would also introduce his ability to camouflage,
as well as his character.
UNKRICH: He's voiced by Steve Buscemi.
DOCTER: Yeah.
When we showed him the character design,
he said, "Hey, you're typecasting me."
"There's somewhat of a physical resemblance."
(UNKRICH LAUGHING)
UNKRICH: He has six arms, anyway. DOCTER: (LAUGHS) Yeah.
DOCTER: I always thought of him as sort of one of those guys in junior high
that just would push you for no real reason.
UNKRICH: Yeah, he was probably a real bully
and a jerk in junior high school,
- and he's just kind of stayed that way. - DOCTER: Yeah.
Coming up here on Roz, she's voiced by Bob Peterson, our head of story.
Originally, she was the orientation manager at Monsters, Inc.
She was such a great character
that when that part got cut out, we recast her as the dispatch manager.
STANTON: I sound like a broken record here, but same deal again.
We couldn't find anybody who made us laugh as much as Bob,
so we ended up going with Bob. Yeah, we tried really hard.
We ended up just pitching Bob up a little bit, and he's Roz.
DOCTER: The scare floor here,
a day in the life of the scare floor, it's just so cool.
I love the way this worked out.
Lee worked really closely with David Silverman
to board the whole thing and then with the layout folks
to put this really cool montage together.
UNKRICH: We just had this idea of the camera constantly moving
and making it feel like those great montages from films of the '30s,
kind of WPA progress, teamwork, everybody working together.
And Randy Newman's great music
is really the icing on the cake in the sequence here.
DOCTER: What I love about it is how
it's basically all visual exposition about the operation of the place,
but it's so exhilarating to watch, and it gets you really pumped up.
UNKRICH: Bob Pauley and Gary Schultz
were really the two responsible for
designing all these door stations and the mechanics of everything.
And they're just such freaks for the details
and making sure everything actually could work.
You almost feel like you could take their designs
and hand them to a company and they could really build these things.
DOCTER: Bob has big airplane parts sitting around in his office.
He's just a fan of industrial design.
UNKRICH: This little bit here, of course, inspired by that classic shot from
The Right Stuff with the astronauts walking down the hall.
DOCTER: Which weirdly enough, you show it to a lot of people,
especially young people today, and they say, "Armageddon."
(BOTH LAUGHING)
DOCTER: So one of the problems in this whole set
was the idea of the door stations.
We wanted to follow the logic that when a monster's in a kid's room,
the kid would sit up and we didn't want them to see back onto the scare floor,
so we thought, "What if we do it like a voting booth"
"where you have this curtain that pulls around?"
But then the problem is the audience can't see the coolness of this,
you know, from the scare floor looking back into the kid's room.
So, that didn't work.
There's actually these weird things in computer graphics,
you can have a light that sucks away light.
It's like a negative light.
So we were playing around with having one of those.
UNKRICH: But that ended up looking just kind of bizarre.
DOCTER: Yeah, you couldn't read it. Your brain didn't get that.
So we ended up just ignoring it,
and maybe the kids do see onto the scare floor, I don't know.
The sign wall was really difficult,
because we had to track it from shot to shot,
make sure that it all made sense.
UNKRICH: Again, people probably won't even notice or care
whether the numbers are correct,
but we spent a long time figuring them all out
and making sure they were tracking correctly.
DOCTER: So we worked backwards from the idea that
Sulley breaks 100,000 this day.
And figuring that,
that means he averages about 445.9 scream units per day,
back-of-the-envelope calculation.
UNKRICH: Just off the top of your head.
DOCTER: This is a particularly good day.
So, we start Sulley at 99,479.
You'll notice at the end of the list, in the very bottom, is Gerson,
who's named after Dan Gerson,
and at the end of the day, his totals go up one scream unit, pathetic.
UNKRICH: A lot of the kids' screams in this sequence are actually our own kids
that we brought in to scream.
Probably made their lives, to be able to stand there
and have their parents actually order them
to scream at the top of their lungs.
This shot coming up here with the cart
was inspired by Terry Gilliam's great film Brazil.
We always knew we wanted to find a place
to put this shot idea into the sequence.
DOCTER: Here comes Henry Waternoose again.
He was voiced by James Coburn,
and he brought this great warmth and vulnerability really to the character.
I'd always thought of him as a hard-hitting businessman,
and Coburn had this sort of sensitive underbelly.
You really feel like the weight of the world,
this factory that's not doing so well now is resting squarely on his shoulders.
You feel a little bad for him.
UNKRICH: He has such a great warmth, like, you trust him.
You just trust that voice, which makes it great later in the film
when we turn the tables and reveal
- that he's not such a great guy. - DOCTER: Don't tell them.
UNKRICH: If this is the first time you're watching the movie,
stop it now and turn us off.
DOCTER: The idea that the door must be shredded
once the kids aren't scared anymore was really meant to be a setup for
why Sullivan can't see Boo again at the end.
And it makes sense, too, that they wouldn't bother
keeping these things around if they're no use anymore.
Randall's assistant, Fungus, is voiced by Frank Oz,
who's one of my heroes growing up as a performer and now as a director.
UNKRICH: Of course, the voice of Miss Piggy and Grover
and a million other great characters.
DOCTER: I love this where he gives them five.
Hand-Eye was actually inspired sort of by puppetry.
The fact that he's just a hand with eyes on the ends of his fingers,
it's just a funny idea.
We had some great concept sketches of how he carries things
and how does he operate stuff by using his eyeballs.
UNKRICH: One last great Pixar cameo coming up here,
George, the orange, furry guy who gets abused throughout the film,
is voiced by Sam Black, who's one of our programmers here.
We just think his voice is incredibly funny.
DOCTER: He came in to read for scratch dialog for Mike,
scratch is what we do temporarily while we're building the reels,
and I could barely restrain myself from
just snickering and laughing through the whole thing.
UNKRICH: So we never tried to find anybody else for him.
We knew Sam had the part from day one.
DOCTER: Yeah.
LASSETER: This is the birth of the CDA, the Child Detection Agency.
Now, after one screening, we were looking at it, and we realized
we were just talking about how dangerous kids were
and we needed to show it.
STANTON: Yeah. I think we had to turn this around
in, like, a day or something like that,
if I remember correctly,
and Ted Mathot and Nathan Stanton, me brother,
they boarded up, they came up with this sort of storm-trooper-esque idea.
- It just sold like a million bucks. - DOCTER: That was amazing.
UNKRICH: We wanted to show just to a ridiculous point
how extreme the idea, how dangerous the idea of a kid
or any element from a kid's world getting into monster world was.
DOCTER: I love this sock, just 'cause it's so tiny and insignificant
and they take it so seriously.
UNKRICH: So if they take it this seriously, imagine if a kid ever got in.
It'd be the worst thing ever. Of course, that's exactly what happens.
DOCTER: That's right.
This shaving thing was a pretty hairy technical problem, no pun intended.
But I think it worked out really great.
In fact, you can see on the floor, when the CDA back up,
their foot scrapes away some of the hair and that all reacts.
It's really cool.
STANTON: It's the details that count at Pixar Animation Studios.
As John Lasseter likes to say,
"We sand the undersides of the drawers."
LASSETER: There were things in Monsters, incorporated
that we could not have possibly done on Toy Story, A Bug's Life,
even Toy Story 2.
One of the things that happens here at Pixar is that
the technical development is really driven by the needs of the story.
And I think in Monsters, incorporated,
one of the big things was to have furry monsters.
And we started looking at a lot of different animals like
- gorillas, orangutans... Yeah. - STANTON: Some bison and bears.
LASSETER: And so we started thinking, "I think it's time to maybe address this."
Typically, the more organic something is in the way it looks or moves
the more difficult it is to do with computer animation.
And so, with this one, we wanted these creatures,
even though they are monsters, they're completely made-up,
we wanted to have it grounded in a sort of reality,
a reality for the monster world.
And we started looking at real animals
and pulled textures and surfaces and so on from the real animal world.
But then we combined it,
which I think was one of your big ideas, was the color.
STANTON: What comes out of your closet is the figments
of your imagination,
and so I started to go, "Well, wait a minute."
"What would a kid think his monsters look like?"
And they tend to have a little bit of a fantastical quality to them.
DOCTER: That shot there, as Mike sniffs his armpits,
that was amazing to me.
He can't turn his head.
UNKRICH: There's no neck. DOCTER: And he has no nose.
UNKRICH: And we needed him to sniff his armpit,
but animator Andrew Gordon did a great job of pulling it off.
DOCTER: This whole sequence was originally staged to be in the parking lot
with Roz in this hotrod.
You know, she had this really fast-moving car
in contrast to her slug nature,
and Sulley and Mike were waiting for the bus to go home.
But we couldn't afford to build the exterior and the bus,
so we re-staged the whole idea
with pretty much the same story beats in the lobby,
which is cool anyway because you get to see it again.
UNKRICH: One of the tough things about computer graphics,
unlike hand-drawn animation,
is if we want a hotrod, we can't just draw it.
We have to spend a long time actually building it,
and if it's gonna end up just being in one shot
it's hard to justify spending all that effort.
DOCTER: This is one of the many little improve
by Jennifer Tilly, "I don't understand."
Just this great little thing she would throw out,
and we would use, peppered throughout.
UNKRICH: She had this great coy, natural quality we fell in love with.
DOCTER: This scene where Sulley lets the little girl into monster world
has been there, really, kind of from the beginning.
STANTON: Yeah, sort of the pivotal idea was monsters and kids,
and very early on we always thought,
"What if you brought a kid into the world of monsters
"rather than staying in the human world?", which we'd have to mimic.
LASSETER: And have the main character let in
what the monsters fear the most.
STANTON: As a matter of fact, I think it even drove that idea.
We thought if a little kid came into the monster world
wouldn't that be the humor of everybody's more scared of it
just as if there was a monster in our world.
And that sort of drove us to think of the movie like that.
We had to come up with the right plot machinations.
LASSETER: And that great twist
that monsters are more scared of kids than kids are of monsters.
STANTON: You never know where those big ideas are gonna come from,
and that really kind of drove it.
But once that was in there,
this scene has pretty much stayed the same for a long time.
It's always been late at night, accidentally, coming into an active door.
DOCTER: This was one of the things that stayed unchanged
was the idea that Sulley responds to this thumping noise,
looks down and there's Boo.
Boo was voiced by Mary Gibbs,
who's the daughter of Rob Gibbs, one of our story artists,
our really great story artist.
UNKRICH: She was about two and a half, right,
when we first started recording her.
She was at that great age
where she was right on the cusp of language acquisition where...
DOCTER: Her parents could understand her but nobody else could.
UNKRICH: Right, she felt like she was talking and had things to say,
but you couldn't understand what she was saying.
There was a lot of debate early on about how to deal with Boo's language.
We kind of vacillated between going this route,
which is just that people can't understand what she's saying
and actually setting up this whole idea
that in monster world humans just sound like gibberish.
And that ended up being a really complicated thing to get across.
DOCTER: Yeah, and I'm not sure how necessary.
We had a shot where Sulley was saying,
"Do you..."
And then you cut to Boo's point of view, and he's going...
(SPEAKING GIBBERISH)
And so on.
UNKRICH: It ended up being cuter just to have her
be kind of unintelligible and innocent.
DOCTER: I think in earlier drafts she was about six in the film.
And as we developed it, we realized
the younger she is the more dependent she is on Sullivan
and therefore really needs his help.
UNKRICH: Back there were what we believe to be the first shots
in computer-generated films of toilets. We're very proud. We actually have
- several shots of toilets in this film. - DOCTER: Another Pixar first.
This here, this turn with Boo on his back,
that was another thing that was early on a real tent pole thing
that we stayed with and people love it. We've had screenings
- where people shriek. - UNKRICH: At our very first preview,
this woman actually let out a huge shriek at that moment,
and we knew we had pulled off the moment.
DOCTER: "Kitty" was one of the three words that Boo has to say in the film.
It was just an idea that we had that she'd... The absurdity of the idea that
she sees this big huge, 8-foot tall, 1,000 pound guy and calls it, "Kitty."
I think there was some difficulty here in stuffing Boo into the bag
and just feeling uncomfortable with that idea
that our main character is stuffing this kid into this little thing,
but it came out okay because she has these little...
UNKRICH: Yeah, we cut in some dialog of her
still just having a good time in there
even though she's muffled.
DOCTER: This is a fake-out. Worked out pretty well.
UNKRICH: I always felt like that was a setup for Randall being allergic to kids,
but it's not.
DOCTER: Of course, Sulley can't send the kid home,
so he has to take her with him.
UNKRICH: Where does he go? Go find Mike.
DOCTER: That's right.
The sushi restaurant, actually, initially,
Harley Jessup, our production designer,
one of the two production designers,
had designed it more like a kitschy Trader Vic's,
with colored lights and big, thick pillars
and a big sloping roof with a neon sign on the top.
And it would've been really cool, but it would've been very expensive to build
and not nearly as upscale.
I mean, this is supposed to be one of the nicer places in town
that Mike takes Celia.
UNKRICH: This shot has one of the most disturbing images, I think,
in the entire film, for me, personally.
It's the toothpick skewering the eyeball on a tray in front of them.
DOCTER: In an earlier version of the story, Mike was gonna propose to Celia,
and Sulley shows up and, of course, ruins the whole moment.
I can't remember why we dumped that.
You know what? Let's call Dan Gerson.
Let's see if I can get him on the phone right now.
(DIALING PHONE)
Let's see what he says.
(PHONE RINGING)
DAN GERSON: Hello? DOCTER: Hi. Dan?
GERSON: Yeah. DOCTER: This is Pete.
GERSON: Hey, Pete. What's going on?
DOCTER: How's it going? I'm calling from Pixar.
We're doing the commentary for the DVD,
and I had a question for you. You ready?
GERSON: Shoot. I'm ready. Shoot. DOCTER: Okay.
You know, we have Harryhausen's,
and Mike and Celia are there, and it's her birthday,
in an earlier draft we had it that
- Mike was gonna propose to Celia. - GERSON: Right.
DOCTER: Do you remember why we took that out?
GERSON: I know! When we were starting to work on the sequence,
we realized that if Mike was gonna ask Celia to marry him,
it implied that there was already
sort of a split happening in his relationship with Sulley.
These two guys were best friends.
We wanted the split between them
to happen when Boo came into their world.
We wanted Boo to be the thing that potentially caused a rift.
So we took out the marriage proposal, because it would've stepped on that.
DOCTER: Genius. Makes sense. GERSON: Makes sense?
- All right, thanks. - Talk to you guys later.
DOCTER: Thanks, Dan. GERSON: Bye.
DOCTER: So, Harryhausen's, the name of the restaurant,
is, obviously, a reference to Ray Harryhausen,
the great stop motion animator of Jason and the Argonauts.
STANTON: The Sinbad movies. DOCTER: Right.
And he was just a great influence on, I think, most of us, growing up.
We'd stay up late and see those cool movies on TV
where he's fighting the skeletons.
STANTON: You know, of all other forms of animation,
stop motion is kind of the closest to what we do now
- in computer-animated films. - DOCTER: Yeah.
STANTON: Having the CDA show up here is, again, just to up the ante
and show how incredibly dangerous it was
for Boo to have been let into the world.
That's our director, Pete Docter, there.
DOCTER: This alleyway here is actually
right next to Mike and Sulley's apartment.
We redressed it with more fire escapes,
squished the buildings closer together to make it feel more like an alley.
This TV news, we've shown it to a bunch of reporters and journalists,
and they were amazed how dead on we got them.
STANTON: It was fun with the lighting and everything.
We wanted to make it feel like
these characters were all getting blasted in the face
with little sun guns.
DOCTER: I love the background animation.
I think this was Pete Nash who did this shot.
Little characters waving and so on. Really cool.
These guys, neither of them have legs,
'cause we never see them. We just modeled the sphere
with the arms and so on.
UNKRICH: But do any newscasters really have legs?
(DOCTER LAUGHING)
DOCTER: Well, when they made the toys, the toys don't have legs, either.
So if you buy the toys...
UNKRICH: That's why they don't have legs.
DOCTER: This whole sequence was another one that came together
pretty early on the boards, and I think the whole concept of these
two huge guys scared out of their gourds
as this innocent little girl walks around destroying their apartment
is just inherently funny.
Rob Gibbs was the guy who boarded a lot of this.
UNKRICH: This sequence was actually really seminal in terms of
nailing down Sulley's physical acting and animation, right?
DOCTER: Yeah. Early on we had him moving much slower.
Because he's so big, our thought was, "Okay, these big huge guys,"
"they can't really... To sell the weight, we have to slow them down."
And what it was doing was actually slowing down
the pacing of the whole film. So we found out that, you know,
you could actually have them move pretty quick
and still retain that feeling of weight.
This crying... I actually videotaped my own kids.
Which, you know, you don't have to wait around too long.
- If you have kids, you know. - UNKRICH: You got toddlers.
DOCTER: That's right. Just wait about five, 10 minutes...
UNKRICH: It's like waiting for a subway train.
DOCTER: Sure enough, off somebody goes, so...
Actually the first pass through, we didn't have the snot.
And as I was watching my daughter, I realized, "Okay, we need the snot."
That's just one of those things that's gonna round out...
It's gonna keep her from becoming just a sappy, cute character,
is to have that snot dripping down from her nose.
UNKRICH: At the end of the scene here, we knew we wanted Boo to laugh
and to have all the power blow out to show how powerful her laugh was.
And one of my rules in films is, you can't have a character laughing
at something if the audience doesn't think it's funny.
So we spent a long time coming up with a really, really funny gag
that would actually get the audience to laugh along with Boo at that moment.
DOCTER: This candlelit lighting was very tricky to do,
and it was actually one of the earlier things that we did in lighting.
We looked at a lot of renaissance paintings and Barry Lyndon...
UNKRICH: The Stanley Kubrick film. DOCTER: Right.
Which was actually lit by candles.
They didn't even have any practical lights on the set.
And in this film, you can see that each flame has a slight pulse and flicker to it
to really get that candle feel, and the problem was
that we animated that, you couldn't see it until it was rendered.
So you'd have to do this animation, wait a day or two
for the turnaround of the pulsing of the lights.
And it drove Janet Lucroy and Joyce Powell,
the two lighting leads on this sequence...
They were just going crazy.
The drawing here that Boo has was actually drawn, initially,
by Harley Jessup, the production designer.
He took it home to his 5-year-old son, Graham,
who then copied it. So we have that authentic kid line quality.
Here you can see, too, Sullivan's hands actually dent the chair.
That was something that we spent quite a bit of time on,
which I'm not sure, in retrospect, we should have.
I mean, it's a cool thing. It adds a lot of, you know, just contact.
It's that extra mile.
STANTON: We sand the underside of the drawers.
DOCTER: That's right.
This was an idea we had early on I really like.
The idea that Sulley creates a little trail,
and he's gonna have Boo sleep over on this pile of newspaper,
like you would a puppy, you know,
in case she goes to the bathroom or anything.
And the cereal pouring out of the box was actually hand animated
frame by frame, as opposed to a dynamic simulation.
It was animated by Dylan Brown.
UNKRICH: Coming up here is some great Randy Newman music.
It was, kind of, the first opportunity in the film for him to play a Boo theme,
which we knew was very critical, not only as a turning point emotionally
for Sulley starting to bond with Boo, but we knew that it was going to be
a theme that we would likely revisit at the end of the film
when he has to say goodbye to her.
DOCTER: Here at this scene, we were really thinking of Sullivan as, sort of,
a Walter Matthau type of guy. He's just... Grumble, grumble.
I like the idea that he effortlessly scrapes these huge bricks...
- UNKRICH: Cinder blocks. - Cinder blocks over there and just
does it without even thinking. Just nudges it with his fingers.
Shows his strength.
UNKRICH: We had to animate an alternate version of that shot
that John Kahrs did for the international market,
since it's so tied to English with him holding up the two fingers.
DOCTER: Boo falling right asleep was an idea that we had in story.
And as we went to animation, I was worried initially that it would be...
She would read as she was narcoleptic or something, so we animated
this whole, kind of, sleepy, slowly eyelid drooping thing,
which was really appealing but didn't have the punch
that this does, so we went back to it.
DOCTER: Randy was a really great collaborator on this show,
and he brought a lot of
richness to the film in his orchestration, in his musical ideas.
As usual, one of the things Randy does so great is these musical themes
that you tie to the characters or to different emotional ideas.
And as Lee was saying, we used that same Boo's theme throughout the film.
We come back to it.
UNKRICH: Sometimes on a solo piano,
sometimes with full orchestration, and it really just
- pulls your heartstrings. - DOCTER: Yeah.
This right here, the set, exterior set, about all that really exists
is this foreground building. The one that says, "We scare because we care."
The background is a matte painting, the giant door vault back there.
DOCTER: Mike as a character came together pretty quickly, actually,
compared to all the other guys.
Ricky Nierva had drawn a little doodle of a guy with one eye,
a little round character with one eye, and everybody just loved it, so...
Jeff Pidgeon and Jason Katz, I think, were the two guys who
boarded this, sort of, test scene. We didn't even have any actual
bit of the film to board. And they came up with this little gag of
Mike helping Sulley choose a tie that he's gonna wear to work,
and it really defined his character very quickly.
UNKRICH: He actually didn't have arms originally, right?
He was just a big eyeball and a pair of legs.
DOCTER: Yeah, he just had two appendages,
which we thought he could use as legs
and arms, which was still a cool idea, but it was rather limiting
and somewhat off-putting.
So we figured we were limited enough
just in the fact that he had one eye only. So...
UNKRICH: That ended up being a challenge.
Just being able to emote well with just a single eye.
DOCTER: Yeah. I think the animators did a great job.
You don't ever really think about it.
You don't think of him as a limited character.
We essentially used the one brow as two,
so in areas where one brow would come up and the other down,
we just took that one brow and curved it
in a way that mimics two brows.
UNKRICH: This little scene here is
really just a setup for the great scene that follows,
where Boo is sitting in the stall, having her little potty break.
DOCTER: So to get Mary to sing, I had a puppet, and I don't remember,
it was just a puppet that I had made, and I said,
"Dear Mary, would you sing for me?" And she said, "Okay," and she just
started singing and then wouldn't stop. "You want another song?"
She'd keep singing and she was a little older by then, by this time.
UNKRICH: Yeah. So we took all that stuff back to the editing room
and nipped and tucked and pieced together, kind of,
a whole gibberish version of the song. And it's funny, this whole song,
it's been kind of like a Rorschach test
for people's psychologies, 'cause everybody hears different things
in the song, and there really seems to be no consensus
- about what she's actually singing. - DOCTER: "She will save mankind."
- Different things... - UNKRICH: And I think she says,
"Lemon yellow kind."
(BOTH LAUGHING)
DOCTER: Toilet flush was one of the first effects that we had, wasn't it?
Was it this scene or is it a different one?
UNKRICH: It was actually earlier but it's stunning.
DOCTER: Okay.
UNKRICH: I think it's really, really cool.
DOCTER: We studied a lot of toilets. People taking videotape and...
UNKRICH: Other people go on research trips to Africa.
- We go to the lavatory. - DOCTER: Yeah, that's right.
This is one of the cheats. One of the really only cheats that we do in the film,
where Boo is laughing here as she's playing, but the lights do not blow out.
UNKRICH: Yeah. You know, we realized at a certain point
that we had her kind of giggling throughout the movie,
and we weren't having lights explode everywhere.
And we just decided to take that leap and not address it,
because we wanted her to be cute and charming,
but we didn't want it to become a big story point every time she giggled.
DOCTER: See, here in Roz's station you can see a lot of the props.
We had this idea that we could pull props from other films,
and it turned out to be somewhat of a myth.
And so we actually had to rebuild everything from scratch,
which actually was great, because it allowed us to really personalize
and make these very particular things, you know,
with fangs and the way monsters would build them.
UNKRICH: Like, you know, the handles on
the cabinets back there are like horns,
- and the tape dispenser. - DOCTER: Yeah.
UNKRICH: You see that everywhere.
You see that at the beginning of the film in Monstropolis.
All the little subtle details in the architecture
all have that, kind of, monstery kind of feeling.
DOCTER: Some of the paperwork in Roz's office
is actually real production reports
from the production of the film.
UNKRICH: There's actually a lot of
meticulously created Monsters, Inc. paperwork
that somebody... Somebody had a lot of time on their hands.
But hopefully you'll be able to look at them somewhere on this DVD
and see all the great work that went into them.
DOCTER: Yeah.
One challenge here was that Randall's supposed to wash his hands.
He can't anywhere near reach the sink. His hands are way too short,
which you can see in this side shot.
- We had to really stretch his arms. - UNKRICH: We kind of faked that.
That happens often, the story guys come up with really great, funny things
for the characters to do, and then the reality is that
the characters can't actually do them. So we have to be creative.
DOCTER: Randall's camouflage is actually a big cheat, too, you know.
He camouflages by grabbing elements of the background
and applying that texture to him.
But if you think about it, if you moved the camera off-center
or looked at him from the side, that camouflage wouldn't work at all.
You know, you'd be able to see him standing right there.
But there again, I think it's one of those movie liberties...
UNKRICH: Yeah, we played kind of fast and loose,
and we kind of straddled between
it being camouflage and being kind of an invisibility kind of a thing.
More great performance from Frank Oz there.
It's great and when we did the recording sessions with him,
you know, you get a little hint of Yoda here and there, Grover
or Miss Piggy all of a sudden.
DOCTER: That was another case where we worked with Frank
and with Steve Buscemi at the same time.
And I think they really pushed each other.
UNKRICH: Mmm-hmm.
DOCTER: This bit of toilet paper stuck to Mike's foot,
Mark Henne was responsible for,
and it was actually very difficult to make sure it could read.
UNKRICH: Yeah, it's those little things
that are so easy to do in hand-drawn animation
and end up being, kind of, a bear to do in CG.
DOCTER: Yeah, and it wasn't key frame animated.
It was a dynamic solution.
LASSETER: Wasn't that bit, where Mike and Sulley
was coming in saying hi to everybody,
originally somewhere else in the film?
STANTON: Like the "top of the morning" stuff.
LASSETER: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was in the lobby, and I think we switched it
to this place.
- STANTON: It was always so funny. - LASSETER: Yeah.
STANTON: The way that John and Billy just...
It was absolutely hilarious. "Did you lose a limb?"
"Did you lose weight, a limb or something?"
- I just love that. - LASSETER: Right.
STANTON: And so we had to use it, and it fit perfectly here.
LASSETER: Yeah, and it kept it moving instead of just standing still.
UNKRICH: We originally had another piece of yodeling music in here
that actually came from Pete's vast collection of yodeling records.
And it was really funny stuff, but we couldn't get the rights to it.
It was such an old recording, they just couldn't track it down.
So we ended up having to create another version of the yodeling
that was funny. I don't think it's quite as funny as what used to be in there,
- but it's pretty funny. - DOCTER: Yeah, it works.
This was another scene where we recorded with Billy and John together.
One of the things that John Goodman did, that I wasn't expecting at all,
was to start singing along with Mike...
(UNKRICH IMITATING SULLEY)
DOCTER: and it really works great.
It, you know, ties everything together. These guys are on the same page.
They both can think as fast as each other.
One of the things I'm really pleased with was,
and I think David Silverman was largely responsible for,
he was the co-director and really worked in story a lot,
Sulley and Mike are not a straight-man, comedy-relief team.
They both, kind of, can rib each other. They can both tell jokes
or play pranks on each other. They're more like college roommates,
and I think that was something that was really great to bring to the show.
LASSETER: I love this idea of Randall bumping into Sulley and, kind of,
momentarily taking on his texture here.
It's kind of the only time that happens in the film, but it's a great idea.
STANTON: You know, I remember Randall not having a schtick early on
and me just saying, "Can he do something cool, like a chameleon?"
"Like, can he turn into something?"
And of course, technically, we could not do that,
but it got everybody thinking, and we just couldn't drop it, you know.
Once that was out there in the room, everybody kind of going,
"Yeah, it would be cool. It would be cool."
But with the technology,
they can snapshot a picture of the background
and then use that actually as a texture map.
I remember the discussion, and it turned out to be so cool,
but there was all this discussion, "Okay, should he move"
"and you see the background,"
"like Felix the Cat's magic bag or something?"
"Or should it be like, you know, sort of him standing still?"
But when we finally came up with the right combination,
it really was so special, 'cause it was kind of creepy.
- It meant he could be anywhere. - DOCTER: Yes. Exactly.
STANTON: You can't talk about Randall,
'cause he could be invisible right behind you.
LASSETER: Totally worked.
DOCTER: This painting, I think, was a really fun idea of,
sort of, playing on that old haunted house thing with
the painting's eyes start to look at you and then there comes Randall.
This was hopefully fairly obvious,
but Randall is up to this weird plot, and Mike and Sulley,
and hopefully the audience, too, believe that he's basically just cheating
to get ahead, to boost his numbers to be able to beat Mike and Sulley.
And so that's what... Randall just plays along with that.
UNKRICH: There's actually, I remember,
an earlier version of the scene
that was pretty funny. It had Mike hiding in a room,
and there was a window looking into the room, and Mike looked up
to see Randall kind of glaring in at him and moving his finger like,
"Come here, I've spotted you." And we then cut out to the hallway
and realize that Randall's just looking at a mirror.
It's like a one-way mirror, and he's actually
picking something out of his teeth, but Mike thinks he's been caught,
so he essentially just gives himself up.
I always thought it was a really funny little bit, but sometimes
- those things go by the wayside. - DOCTER: That's right.
Here in the hallway you can see, it's basically the same...
I think we had four or five, like a grid work of halls.
And we tried to make them look different by putting different textures
on the walls between the wood and the...
UNKRICH: This is, kind of, the executive wing.
DOCTER: Yes. And there's a bunch of
different placards, you know, on the wall there.
It says, "B. Brute" behind where the geeks come out of.
UNKRICH: It's an office of "Inhuman Resources."
DOCTER: That's right.
UNKRICH: We kind of got a little more comic with the CDA here,
which, you know, it was just to have a little fun with them
and not keep them quite so
- personality-less. - DOCTER: Yeah.
Garbage is one of the most difficult things to model convincingly.
We took a lot of the props that we had and beat them up a little bit,
as best we could. And coming up here in the trash cube
was actually very, very difficult. We took individual pieces and
stuck them all together and tried to squish them, and that sort of worked,
but what we ended up doing was taking a picture of that.
You know, any given side, we took a picture of it
and did a little bump map onto it, so that it looks as though
it's been squished together.
DOCTER: This whole section is borrowed, shall we say,
from one of all of our favorite cartoons.
And so we took the basic idea of that and...
UNKRICH: Doug Sweetland animated all those shots on Sulley, right?
DOCTER: Yeah, really great stuff.
UNKRICH: This was a tricky scene
because we didn't wanna get too serious with it.
He really thinks Boo's getting crushed in this machine,
but we didn't wanna play real anguish, because that would be
- kind of a downer. - DOCTER: Yeah.
UNKRICH: So we kind of took the risk of playing it a little more comical here.
DOCTER: There's some nice Brett Coderre animation in the faint.
UNKRICH: This sequence of Mike running around
trying to find Sulley used to be a longer sequence.
There was actually some great stuff we animated
of him running around trying to find him, but ultimately
we just wanted to keep the movie moving along,
so we trimmed it down somewhat.
DOCTER: I don't remember who had the idea of CDA all in the toilet stalls,
but it really cracked us up.
UNKRICH: Hey, everybody's gotta go sometime.
DOCTER: That's right. We figured they have hoses that detach.
They don't actually unzip their suits.
STANTON: And that's all the detail we're going to go into.
DOCTER: That's right.
So Sulley's here with the cube. This, again, is Brett Coderre animation
of Sullivan.
UNKRICH: Gary Rydstrom did a great little sound effect right there,
when the lamp tips forward. It's kind of a homage to John Lasseter's
short film, Luxo Jr. Did a little Luxo vocalization in there.
DOCTER: These kids again were mostly our own kids
that we brought in to say,
"Mike Wazowski."
UNKRICH: There's just something great about kids when they're not acting,
they don't know what they're doing or that you're recording them.
You get just, kind of, a great real, charming quality to the voice.
DOCTER: So this character here, the voice was the daughter of Joe Ranft.
Joe is one of our great story guys and the voice of Wheezy
in Toy Story 2 and Heimlich in A Bug's Life.
And his daughter Sophia did the voice...
- (IMITATES SOPHIA) "Mike Wazowski." - DOCTER: Yeah.
Those guys hitting each other, I think that's actually, Lee...
UNKRICH: That's my daughter Hannah and...
DOCTER: And my son Nicholas.
So the lighting here on the scare floor is really great.
We based it on a cathedral or Grand Central Station.
You know, that bright light coming in from outside.
It's one of four or five different lighting setups that we have on the scare floor.
And Dominique Louis, who is our art director, did...
The way he would basically work was, he would take the layouts,
paint on, using pastels, paint on the basic lighting setup,
and then those would go to the lighting artists
who would use them as an inspiration to start from. And...
UNKRICH: It's amazing to look at these pastels. You basically...
It's like looking at the entire movie, and it's very close to how
all the individual shots ended up getting lit.
They're, you know, just like pieces of art in their own right.
DOCTER: Hopefully you have the chance to see those on this very disc.
UNKRICH: One of the reasons for this scene being here is that we thought
it would be really cool to have a scene where Randall camouflages
and we don't know where he is.
We know he could be anywhere in the room,
and there's this threat that he could, you know, show up at any moment.
And, you know, kind of keep the music to a minimum and just really
let this moment be really chilling.
DOCTER: Gary Rydstrom had an idea to, every time Randall camouflages,
to use just a little bit of sound from what he's camouflaging into.
So, you can hear the cans kind of clink as he disappears.
UNKRICH: One of our concerns at this point in the film was that
we had been spending so much time at Monsters, Inc. in the hallways,
we were worried that it was gonna start to feel a little claustrophobic.
So at this point in the film we introduced this idea of the secret lair,
which gave us an opportunity to bring some new design
and new locations into the story.
DOCTER: Of course, the only way to a secret lair is through a secret entrance.
LASSETER: Wasn't the entrance to the secret lair
like a candy machine originally, right?
STANTON: Yes, that's my fault. It was in my script. I'm to blame.
DOCTER: Now, what was the name of the candy again?
STANTON: It was called Juicy Fright,
and there was a larger plot that we were aware of at the time,
in my script, and so I love, you know, geeky setups and I thought,
"What if there was this candy machine that was always out of order"
"and Mike always wanted to get stuff from it?"
"And it actually covered the hall that brought you to the secret lair,"
"and if you ordered Juicy Fright, it would open up and you'd go down."
And it worked for a long time, but then the more we decided
to leave the audience out of the know that there was something going on,
and the more we wanted people not to think
that Waternoose had anything to do with it,
it couldn't be so hi-tech. It had to be low-tech.
Had to be sort of this makeshift door.
DOCTER: And more inconspicuous. STANTON: Yes.
DOCTER: Because, I mean, with the candy machine there you'd think...
STANTON: Somebody would have fixed it.
DOCTER: Yeah. Somebody would have wanted the candy
and fixed it, and all like that.
STANTON: It seemed good on paper.
DOCTER: Okay. STANTON: Yeah.
DOCTER: The pipes overhead were actually built originally.
Sulley was a refinery guy. He worked back in the refinery
and extracted scream out of cans. And as the story developed
and he became the top scarer instead,
we cleaned out the pipes from the scare floor
and used them here, underground.
UNKRICH: The pipes are actually really interesting.
We knew we wanted to have this whole maze network of pipes everywhere
and we didn't wanna have to build them all, for each instance, by hand,
so we developed this whole system we called pipematic.
DOCTER: Right, and the pipematic is a shader system
where you can take... Shaders are the textures on the surfaces.
You can turn up rust or turn down dust or speckling
or texture and all sorts of things. You have a great amount of control
and flexibility so that you can... They're very flexible.
UNKRICH: So it's basically like having a big Tinkertoy set of pipes
- to work with. - DOCTER: Yup.
UNKRICH: And we actually ended up using the pipes
to build lots of other things in the movie, too.
Sophie Vincelette and her set dressing team,
the pipematic proved to be really versatile,
making stands for lamps and all kinds of things.
DOCTER: The lighting in this section, I think, works really great.
And one of the ideas behind it is that the refining is being done up above
where we are. We're in, sort of, this subterranean level
that you're not actually supposed to be in.
Nobody ever goes down here, and so the light you can see spills in,
in just little leaks of this, sort of, orangey-green light.
UNKRICH: The scream extractor design is really, really cool because
it's actually built out of lots of other machinery we've already seen
in the movie. The main arm is, kind of, a piece of a door station, and it's not
that we're trying to just reuse props. It's the idea that the characters,
kind of, used what they had to put together this horrible machine.
DOCTER: Yeah. They're just doing this on their own, you think, at the time,
and they're building it out of spare parts.
That's the side of the door, the door station, you can see there.
UNKRICH: Their little console there is, kind of, made up out of the keypads
- that control the door stations. - DOCTER: Yeah.
UNKRICH: Some more pipematic here you see, in the foreground,
that we're, kind of, moving by with Randall.
DOCTER: So this was a Dan Gerson line.
He was one of our writers on the show.
The car thing, which I always thought was really funny.
And, of course, here the idea is that Sulley has somehow
snuck up in the overhead pipes and...
UNKRICH: We actually used to have a lot of stuff in the story
- where Sulley was up in the pipes. - STANTON: That's right.
UNKRICH: We had a version of the scene later on
where he comes back and rescues Boo,
where he, kind of, dangles upside down and gets her out of the chair
while nobody's watching, which ended up being just a little farfetched.
DOCTER: Yeah. This whole idea of the lips...
We actually tried a bunch of different stuff.
Just what was the funniest, you know, in terms of the redness
and puffiness, and ended up here.
DOCTER: This part right here, Mike is standing
and you can see outside. That's just...
Only through lighting that we sold that that was outside.
We parked a car. It's just another room, another room outside.
We parked a car and lit it brightly, and it looks like outside.
Here we're back to the tryout room where Thaddius is trying once again
- to do a good job. - UNKRICH: That's Jeff Pidgeon.
One of our great story guys did the voice of Thaddius Bile,
and Jeff also... His most famous part was
as the little squeeze toy aliens in the Toy Story films.
DOCTER: So this was a really tricky part of the film.
Sullivan ends up scaring Boo without knowing it.
And we had done one version where Boo was basically in Mike's arms
throughout this whole scare. And as we were...
We had actually finished animating it.
UNKRICH: Yeah, it was all done. The scene was finished.
And Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, got in touch with us.
He'd seen a screening of the film and it just wasn't sitting quite right with him.
He felt like the emotional impact of Sulley scaring Boo could be stronger.
And he had this idea of Boo actually, kind of, running up and getting close
to Sulley when he does the scare.
And it was a great idea and we made the changes necessary to
have the scene play out that way, and, you know, it was just...
There's a much more visceral impact to the moment of Sulley scaring Boo
the way we ended up re-staging it.
DOCTER: It's funny, there's a lot going on in this scene.
There's a lot of exposition of Mike saying that Randall has this plot
and he has to tell Waternoose about it and so on and so on.
And at the same time, there's this emotional stuff of Sulley
dealing with the fact that he's just scared this little kid,
this kid that he's grown to love and care for.
And I was really concerned early on that we needed to get
more of that exposition out of the way, but as is always the case,
- it's really the emotion that carries it. - STANTON: Right.
UNKRICH: Yeah. It was really critical for Sulley's character at this point.
We wanted to really put him through the wringer.
We wanted him to feel like... It's like when you have kids
and say you're taking them out of the car and you bonk their head
on the door frame. You feel really bad about it, you know.
Something bad happens that was your fault and all you wanna do
at that moment is take it back.
And we wanted Sulley to, kind of, feel those parental feelings at this moment.
DOCTER: So, once again, even though there's all this exposition going on of,
"I can't believe this happened in my company," and so on,
Sulley's really remained focused on the fact
that Boo has been scared,
and he just feels awful about that.
This was kind of a far-fetched idea, initially, is that
the tryout simulator, that doesn't actually do anything,
is hooked up, somehow, to the overhead track.
- But, yeah, I think you buy it. - UNKRICH: You do. We had to do it
both to bring in the banishment door,
but also to set up Sulley's switcheroo on Waternoose
- at the end of the film. - DOCTER: Well, we'd initially had him
take them all to the scare floor and banish them there, but it just
was extra time that we didn't need to spend.
UNKRICH: I remember, in one of Andrew's early scripts,
he had this cut where we cut to the Himalayas,
and there was actually text on the screen that said,
"Somewhere in the Himalayas."
And I thought that was so great. It was just such a
180-degree turn, I thought, "Wow! I wanna see that movie."
DOCTER: Yeah.
STANTON: That's exactly what always happens,
is eventually we turn back into audiences of our own film,
and if something's just not working,
you just wanna shake it up. And I remember
saying to you, Peter, I remember saying,
"You know, something crazy just needs to happen here,"
"like suddenly they're thrown through a door"
"and, boom, they're in the Himalayas."
And we just honestly said,
"Well, jeez, why not?" And, you know, and then figure out from there
how the heck you're gonna make that work for the movie.
But you know that's what you want.
It's what you want as an audience member.
UNKRICH: Yeah, you want the audience just to go,
"Okay, how are they gonna get back now?"
LASSETER: Right. Right.
LASSETER: Yeti's cave. DOCTER: Oh, boy!
Oh, boy, we must've boarded this sequence,
literally, 30 to 40 times.
I'm not kidding, it's just... And poor Rob Gibbs,
who was actually the father of Mary, the voice of Boo,
he ended up doing most of them,
although Joe Ranft did a couple of them, too.
It was just a really tricky scene.
I mean, there's so much emotional weight here
between Sulley and Mike.
You know, the whole film, basically, their friendship
has been tested, and this is the point where it breaks.
In fact, early on, we had them get back together
in this scene and both go on, back to the...
UNKRICH: And it was just too easy.
It was too easy in such a short scene to take them all the way to their
friendship breaking up and then getting them back together.
DOCTER: Yeah.
UNKRICH: We knew for a long time that we
wanted to have John Ratzenberger
play the yeti, and John's been in all of our films.
He plays Hamm in the Toy Story movies,
and he was P.T. Flea in A Bug's Life,
and we like to think of him as our lucky charm
here at Pixar.
DOCTER: In the background there you see a box of
lingonberry jam. There was a whole gag
that we had at the beginning of the scene, it was after
Sulley and Mike see the yeti in the snow,
instead of saying, "Welcome to the Himalayas,"
he just roared.
And then you cut to him, eating what looks like
blood on a knife.
(IMITATING SLURPING)
And then you see...
UNKRICH: The camera slowly pulled back
- and revealed he was just eating jam. - DOCTER: Right. "Jam?"
"Some terrified mountain climbers left it behind."
I remember when we first came up with the idea for the snow cones.
We said we wanted them to be yellow
and to have him go,
"Oh, no, no, no, it's lemon," you know.
STANTON: Right. DOCTER: We loved that.
And what's interesting is, it was really late
in the production,
and the way that they had rendered them,
we just didn't have time
- to put much detail in them. - UNKRICH: Yeah.
DOCTER: And the joke was falling flat.
And it was Darla Anderson, the producer, that came in and said,
"You know, I don't care if we don't have time."
"We have got to make those look better."
UNKRICH: Yeah. DOCTER: And she insisted,
and they did. They made them look fantastic.
STANTON: Bright yellow. DOCTER: Yeah, bright yellow,
and it looks like a snow cone. You know, it has all the ice.
UNKRICH: Crystallized and everything.
For those of you raised in the northern hemisphere,
you'll know that was accurate, you know.
LASSETER: And what's very funny is that
that texture change made all the difference in the world.
- Then the joke started landing. - STANTON: Yes.
- It's amazing, what a difference... - DOCTER: Yeah.
- A shade of yellow will make. - DOCTER: Yeah.
UNKRICH: It was kind of an 11th hour addition,
- and I think it's pretty hilarious. - DOCTER: Yeah.
UNKRICH: In addition to boarding this scene tons of times,
we actually recorded it quite a few times
with John Goodman and Billy Crystal.
And in those early versions,
you know, the scene just wasn't working, and you could tell
the two of them, being great actors, were really struggling with the scene,
because it just wasn't feeling real.
And when we finally got the scene working right,
near the end of the process, it was clear to everybody involved
that we had finally nailed it, because they were both able to
really invest themselves emotionally in the material,
and I think they both did some of the best work
that they did on the film.
DOCTER: Yeah, you could tell in the room that it was just working.
The lighting and the shaders in this scene are really beautiful.
We worked hard to get
a sort of back lit translucency to the ice.
You feel like it is ice, that there's some amount of light coming
from outside, from the moonlight.
There's various textures to the snow that all have to...
This whole cave, unlike most rooms,
it has a floor and a ceiling and so on.
The whole thing is one piece, so it was actually very tricky
to get the shaders to look right, smooth.
Again, the translucency, you can see on the sides
of the icicles, as well.
UNKRICH: I'm actually happy that, except for the very end of the scene,
there's no music in this scene. It's easy to fall on the crutch of
putting music in everywhere,
and I think this scene is much more effective by not having any music.
DOCTER: This whole scene was an idea that Lee had
to just get him out of there
and to have a bit of action now after this slow bit.
And to do it, we'd actually built this sort of
pizza-like model of snow
around the door, the one door that they get banished out of.
And so we tipped it on its side, added a bunch of rocks into it,
and that became his sled ride down the hill.
UNKRICH: The goal was to just make
as exciting a little sequence out of it as possible
and just make him feel really triumphant,
like he was in control of everything and he was gonna go rescue Boo,
and at the last minute, yank the rug out from under him
and have him just completely wipe out with no hope of
accomplishing his goal.
DOCTER: Steve May did the effects on this shot
of Sulley wiping out in the snow,
and I think it's one of the more amazing shots in the film.
UNKRICH: Yeah, I think it's really, really cool.
DOCTER: Here, we go back to George.
UNKRICH: That's Phil Proctor from Firesign Theatre
- doing the voice of Charlie. - STANTON: Charlie.
DOCTER: Finally, George gets his comeuppance there.
He's not gonna stand for being 2319 anymore.
So now we go back to Boo,
who's now been captured and put into the chair.
UNKRICH: We actually used to have a whole extended sequence in here,
where Sullivan ran down, and he thought
he was bursting into the room where Boo was,
but he actually burst into a room full of cages.
This giant room full of cage after cage after cage
that was basically setting up the idea that
this was gonna be a giant operation, and they were gonna be,
you know, extracting scream from lots of kids, and they...
DOCTER: It set up that exposition
and was sort of a surprise for people that instead of,
"Tada! There he is," he was in a cage room instead.
UNKRICH: Right, and it was cool. It was cool, this idea that
this operation, this was gonna be a huge operation,
but ultimately, it was just really slowing down the pacing of the film,
and we thought it was more important just to have Sulley burst in
and rescue Boo and kind of move on with the movie.
DOCTER: She's the only kid we know at this point in the film,
so she's the only one who we care about.
UNKRICH: It was very difficult, too. I think we were doing it well
in terms of setting up the idea clearly of what was going on,
but ultimately, we decided that,
hopefully, the audience was just gonna gather that
this was going to be an ongoing operation with lots of kids.
DOCTER: This idea of Sullivan having to fight an invisible force,
you never know where he is, he's really fast, he's really quick,
strong and invisible, made him...
It was a challenge actually, because his design
was such that he looked like kind of a wimp.
UNKRICH: And it was important that people not think,
"Why doesn't Sulley just, you know,
- "grab him and deck him?" - DOCTER: Yeah.
UNKRICH: Sulley's obviously such a much bigger guy.
It was important for the climax of the film and the door vault
- that Randall be a real threat... - DOCTER: Right.
UNKRICH: and be seen as a really dangerous character to Sulley.
And this sequence was really designed to do just that.
DOCTER: So here again, we're teetering on an edge between actual
tension and drama and the comedy of sort of slapstick fight stuff,
you know...
(IMITATING SULLEY)
Stuff that Sulley's doing.
Trying to make it funny and appealing to people, but still
- have that tension and drama. - UNKRICH: You wanna have the threat
and danger of Randall, but not have it be too violent.
DOCTER: Yeah, I also love this idea that
Randall's exposed by being hit by the snowball.
- That's where you can finally see... - UNKRICH: Accidentally.
DOCTER: Finally see where he is.
So Jennifer Tilly, when she was recording these screams,
she would back up across the room,
run towards the microphone, and scream at the top of her lungs.
Method acting, she's great.
This scene here is actually pretty tricky technically,
the fact that Sullivan is pulling these guys
across the floor and still bouncing up and down and all this.
A lot of attaches and so on.
"Mike Wazowski," that's another one of the words that
Mary Gibbs actually had to say.
I think she says, "Mike Wazowski,"
- "Boo" and "Kitty." - UNKRICH: Kitty, yeah.
And that's about it.
DOCTER: So here we were really trying to involve...
Everybody really loved Celia
as we were developing her as a character
as this story was coming together,
trying to use her to defeat Randall in some way.
STANTON: We wanted to give her one last little moment in the sun,
because we knew we were gonna be
basically losing her till the end of the film...
DOCTER: So we were trying to think, "Okay,"
"we'll use her receptionist skills, right?"
(UNKRICH LAUGHING)
DOCTER: So she uses the phone
to do the overhead page, and then we went back
in the film and layered in some other pages that you can hear.
UNKRICH: We used to have a more, kind of, female computer voice
doing all the announcements about the scare leader
on the scare floor, and we ended up
replacing those all with Jennifer Tilly to set up that idea.
DOCTER: So as soon as we came up with an idea that
the monsters scare kids through the closet door,
we knew that then, somewhere, there needed to be
a place where they housed,
you know, I think we did calculations of like 36 million doors
of all the kids around the world that they scare.
And as soon as we had that idea, I knew we had a great climax
of this roller coaster ride.
And not only is it a roller coaster, as you can see in this section,
which is really fun, but it's also a chase around the world.
You know, because you can go through any door and be anywhere in the world.
UNKRICH: This is the kind of scene where
when you describe it for the first time
to the technical people who are actually gonna have to
help you create, you know, the sets and be able to render it,
it's a kind of moment where you can hear a pin drop.
DOCTER: (LAUGHING) Yeah.
This vault is taller than the Empire State Building,
and it's, I think, half a mile long.
UNKRICH: You can actually fit, we figured out,
a Statue of Liberty on any one given level
- of the door vault. - DOCTER: Yeah.
Yeah, it's massive.
And Tim Milliron came up with,
he was one of the technical directors on the show,
came up with a way to actually render all the doors.
We were initially thinking we were gonna have to do tons of cheating
and maybe paint and stuff like that,
but he came up with a way to trick the computer into thinking
that these flat pieces of paper are actually doors,
you know, that they have some relief to them, and so on.
UNKRICH: This is, if you listen to the music here in Hawaii,
it's actually me playing the ukulele
with Bruno Coon, our music editor, and Pete's on the upright bass.
DOCTER: Yeah, and Bruno actually wrote all the music for the other
international rooms, as well.
All the rooms that we go into and out of
in this section are basically one of two rooms.
There's a generic room and Boo's room.
And the generic room, we'd just turn and twist in different ways,
texture it, color it differently,
and that's basically how we do it.
UNKRICH: This whole sequence, I think, is a real
tour de force for everyone concerned.
It was a real challenge from a layout perspective
in terms of designing all the staging and the camera movement
and compositions.
One of the cool things about computer animation
is that we are able to shoot our scenes as though we're shooting live action.
We have these sets built, and we have these little virtual cameras
that we can go in and shoot angles and shoot coverage,
shoot multiple angles, and then come back to the cutting room
and kind of put it all together before we actually animate,
so it allows us to create some really great dynamic scenes
and dynamic staging.
DOCTER: This whole thing with the falling, I always thought was really cool,
that they're falling and the way they escape
is to actually go into the thing on which they're falling. It's just
something that wouldn't have been possible in any other film, really.
Sullivan's fur is one of the big, big technical achievements in this film.
And I think this sequence shows it off
- really well. - UNKRICH: Really shows it off.
DOCTER: It's a dynamic thing,
so the animators are kind of like the actors in their show.
They bring the personality, the performance to the character.
And they worked with, basically, a bald version of Sullivan.
UNKRICH: You don't want them to get bogged down
in kind of the physics of how hair moves.
You just want them to concentrate on the performance.
DOCTER: I think he has three million hairs, so it'd have been just impossible
for them to animate it by hand.
So once their performance is done,
that whole thing is fed into the simulation program
which moves the fur.
In here, we have an added layer of complexity,
because they're moving through space, and to get that effect,
we set up a wind generator on the fur,
and shot by shot, we had to call out different amounts of that wind
depending on how fast he was meant to be going.
This again, this idea of the two worlds colliding here
at this threshold, you see a kid's room
careening through space in the door vault,
it was one of those things that
just from early on, I was really excited about.
UNKRICH: It was cool to be stable inside the room,
yet see the whole monster world outside the door moving.
It's the only time in the film that we do it,
and it's really cool.
This was another change that we made kind of late in the game,
was kind of really pumping up this Randall's comeuppance
and Boo's triumph over Randall.
This used to be a kind of a much shorter little bit,
and it didn't have her bonking him on the head with the bat
and all the color changing and everything.
We realized it in early preview
that the audience really wanted to cheer for Boo,
and we weren't quite there yet.
So we spent some time kind of pumping up this scene
and letting Boo kind of have a real triumph
over her fears and over Randall.
DOCTER: Randall's comeuppance was something that
Nate Stanton, who is one of the story artists on the show,
he came up with this idea that
Randall gets stuck in the swamp, you know, and mistaken for a gator.
- And so... - UNKRICH: Down in the bayou.
DOCTER: And it stuck. UNKRICH: That's, of course, the trailer
from A Bug's Life, with the Pizza Planet truck parked outside.
DOCTER: And inside are two versions of the sim kid,
the simulated kid at the beginning of the show.
And they're just used... You know, you can see their shadows.
I think we put an extra sphere in the back of one
- to make it look like Mom. - UNKRICH: Like a bun.
DOCTER: Yeah.
UNKRICH: This is, of course, to,
you know, set up the idea that Boo's about to go home
and everything's got a happy feeling,
- and we pull out the rug again. - DOCTER: Yeah.
So Mike's move that brings down the house,
we had animated.
Shawn Krause, one of the animators on the show,
he'd done, I think, three or four different
moves that he could have done, just little kind of dance steps,
and I think he did one where Mike accidentally slipped,
beaned himself between the legs.
But we really felt like it was the most painful for him
to intentionally do it,
and then the humor is that Boo didn't actually see him
go through all this agony.
UNKRICH: The scenes coming up here, where Mike
kind of fakes everybody out by having a sock appear in his mouth
and throwing it at the CDA
was something that we always had early on.
But we were worried that,
you know, they just came up with this idea at the last moment,
where did they get the sock from?
We thought, "Well, it's Boo's sock."
Well, Boo was wearing both of her socks for the rest of the film,
so we had to look into the possibility
of taking off one of her socks, which was a problem.
DOCTER: So initially, the technical directors, the modelers were saying,
"Okay, it's gonna take another"
"three, four weeks to build the foot..."
UNKRICH: Because we didn't actually have
the foot that went inside the sock. We just had a sock.
DOCTER: Well, it turns out, we actually did have the foot.
It was built long ago as a kind of a base on which to build the sock.
So we pulled that out of the archives
and put it on her stump of a leg.
And there, Boo has bare feet through the rest of the film.
UNKRICH: Some great Doug Sweetland animation here of Waternoose, really,
turning him completely from a grandfatherly, trusted character
into a really powerful, violent, scary guy.
DOCTER: Yeah.
UNKRICH: There was a lot of debate about this moment.
We wanted to set up this whole switcheroo that,
you know, Sulley's trying to trick Waternoose into thinking that
he's actually activating Boo's door here,
but of course he knows he's not doing that.
DOCTER: So for those of you who are taking notes,
he pushes the wrong button.
UNKRICH: We, of course, never show the red light go on over the door,
because it wouldn't have really gone on.
It's one of those tricky things where
we were really thinking through the logic of the moment,
and we had to catch ourselves and not get too caught up in
trying to explain away exactly what was going on.
DOCTER: As soon as we came up with that idea of faking it out,
we knew that then we had to go back and re-engineer
both the simulator room and Boo's room
to be very close to each other,
in architecture, in color, and actually they're not.
I mean, this is a total lighting cheat here that it looks somewhat pink.
That's Boo's room color,
and then you'll see when the lights come on here that it's more of a yellow,
and, you know, it's a stage-type setup, so I think we have that liberty.
DOCTER: This monitor bank of six different monitors,
we took the same animation... That's one of the cool things of 3D animation.
We took the same animation, set up six different cameras
and looked at it from those six different views.
One of the things that wasn't so cool
was that it didn't really always hold up, so we had to reanimate some stuff,
do a lot of lighting tweaks to get that to read,
and then on top of all that go through this video post-process
to make it look as though it was on TV with the scan lines
- and pause effect and all that. - UNKRICH: It does look cool.
DOCTER: This whole idea that Roz was number one,
I don't remember where that came from,
but it really struck us as sort of absurdly funny,
and hopefully by now the audience realizes this is a comedy
and you just sort of go with it.
She's been doing this undercover work.
UNKRICH: I love that she's still got a sweater on.
It's just now a yellow CDA sweater.
DOCTER: That's right.
UNKRICH: I think this is some of Bob Peterson's finest work,
- as the voice of Roz. - DOCTER: That's right.
So Roz basically moves very slowly. The sort of rule of thumb is
the less movement she does, the more true it is to her character,
except her mouth.
(IMITATING ROZ) She can really go pretty extreme with her mouth shapes,
and that was one of the things that made her still feel alive and interesting.
So the button here that Sullivan pushes to activate the door is
labeled FIZT, which is the name of the tool
which does the physical simulation of Sullivan's fur,
and Boo's shirt as well. That was another thing,
like Sullivan, where the animators were focused on the performance,
the movement of the underlying body and the shirt is then draped over
and dynamically moves and folds in the right way.
So to me, this is really one of the key emotional things about the film.
I think the whole film really relies and rests on
the relationship between Sulley and Boo,
and actually very early on we didn't even have Mike in the film.
It was all about Sullivan and Boo.
And this scene is really where he has to say goodbye to her,
and he's grown to really care for her and love her as a parent.
For me, it was always kind of the idea that I have kids,
and some day those kids are gonna grow up and they're gonna leave,
and that's really sad, but it's beautiful. It's part of life,
and I think it's something that people relate to,
or that adults relate to when they watch this film.
UNKRICH: When Randy Newman
first played us this solo piano version of Boo's theme,
it just brought tears to all of our eyes.
I think it's the most beautiful piece he wrote in the entire film,
and I think this moment could have easily been kind of
overpowered by too much music,
and I think his choice to go down to the solo piano really...
It just is emotionally powerful.
DOCTER: Yeah.
We worked really hard here on...
If you can see Sullivan as Boo hugs him,
these tears, his eyes get really glossy,
and these wells of tears kind of accumulate in the bottoms of his eyes,
and we worked really hard to get that to work
just right in a very subtle way that doesn't make you go,
"Oh, he's crying. Tears are running down his cheeks."
It's just a subtle little thing that I think works even better.
Here Boo runs over to the door.
She actually grows about 7O% as she runs to the door
because she's not tall enough to reach the door knob.
So the animator stretched her out,
just grew her, just a little bit. You can't tell.
This, the inside of the closet is a nice painting
done by Glenn Kim, who's one of our painters on the show.
The door shredder itself was kind of tricky
because we wanted to have these particles flying up and in the air
just to show you that it was shredding the door.
And at the same time, we had this story point that
you needed every piece to put the door back together in order for it to work.
So we kind of arrived at, they're small enough to be kind of dust,
you know, sawdust type things...
UNKRICH: But they're still big chunks
that Mike can ultimately put back together.
DOCTER: Yeah.
There we had to have that shot looking up,
because there's nothing over there,
you know, the shot of the truck driving away.
UNKRICH: Roger Rose animated this shot with all the characters,
and he's kind of become one of our fallbacks for any shot
that has a ton of characters in it. It's like, "Who's gonna animate this?"
- "Well, Roger will do it." - DOCTER: Lucky Roger.
He did a great job.
This shot, here, we initially had Sulley just stopping short
and kind of staring,
and we felt like it was important for the audience to be clued in
that he has some particular idea,
something that he's gonna try for the future.
These shots we tried to mimic, as closely as possible,
the exact same shots from the beginning of the film.
And it's the same score and everything at this moment.
We had a real challenge disguising the fact that that's Mike,
because he's so recognizable even in silhouette.
UNKRICH: Billy loved this idea of kind of a failed standup comedian's act.
- He really had a great time with it. - DOCTER: Yeah.
And he did a great job. It's funny because it's so...
- He's dying so badly, you know. - UNKRICH: Yeah.
The topper to this moment, for a long time, was Mike
just kind of, I think, he threw his microphone up in the air,
and it bonked him on the head, and he fell off his stool,
and that's what made this kid laugh.
Yes, doing some physical comedy,
and it broke my rule of, "Can't have a character laugh at something"
"that the audience isn't laughing at." Nobody laughed at it.
So we came up with this whole kind of gross-out idea with the belch.
'Cause, hey, burps are funny.
DOCTER: That's right, the thing that really makes it for me
is the fact that the kid just loves it, you know.
It's the best thing he's seen in years.
UNKRICH: When all else fails, belch.
DOCTER: So the scare floor here is, of course, the same,
though it's actually, now, transformed into the laugh floor.
It's the same architecture and everything
with some new set dressing and new signage and so on.
Trying to make it look as cheerful as possible.
UNKRICH: The "Think Funny" banner in the background kind of an homage
to our CEO, Steve Jobs' other company...
DOCTER: That's right. UNKRICH: Apple Computer.
DOCTER: Mike goes to grab this magazine, and, of course,
he's once again been covered up. Business Shriek.
UNKRICH: For a long time, before we finally got this rendered,
whenever Mike opened the box, it was just an image of the sushi bar,
and it made absolutely no sense.
And we knew what was gonna be on the cover ultimately,
but it was literally months before we finally got it rendered
with that magazine cover on it.
The moment finally made sense.
DOCTER: I love the idea that Thaddius is now
using his failed scare to amuse kids
at the end of the film.
UNKRICH: It's also really cool, I don't think people immediately recognize it,
but, you know, because laughter is so much more powerful than scream,
we now have these huge tanks
- to hold the more powerful scream. - DOCTER: Yeah.
UNKRICH: It's kind of a subtle thing, but it's pretty cool.
It's always tricky with these films. This film kind of needed to have
kind of an extended ending.
We have multiple scenes after Boo goes back home.
You know, when Sulley says goodbye to Boo, it kind of feels like
the film's approaching its ending, yet we still have several scenes here.
And it's always a difficult balancing act to pull that off,
because people get a sense that the movie is ending,
but, you know, we really wanted this reunion here
at the end to have a lot of emotional impact,
and if we had rushed into it,
it just wouldn't have had the same feeling that it has.
DOCTER: Early on, my initial thought was that
once Sulley says goodbye to Boo, he can never see her again.
And once he does that,
then we have sort of an ending with Mike and Sulley again.
And we kind of struggled with that,
because the audience really wants to see her again.
And we came up with this, I think, very successful ending
that allows you to have the feeling that they get together again,
but you don't actually get to see her.
UNKRICH: We got a lot of reaction from test screening audiences
that they really wanted to see an image of Boo at the end,
and rather than cave into that and give them that,
we decided that we had done ourjob well
because the audience wanted to see her so badly.
DOCTER: Leave them wanting more.
LASSETER: You know, when we came up with the initial idea,
we wanted to tap into what was familiar to the audience.
And that is that kids are scared in their bedrooms, in the dark.
They're afraid of monsters coming out of the closets.
And so, when we started getting into the story,
it was really fun to sort of play into that notion
and then immediately change it
and show that monsters are in fact far more scared of kids
than kids are of monsters.
It's fun to play into the audience's expectation and what is familiar to them,
and then immediately show it to them
in a way that they've never seen before.
STANTON: I don't think we were conscious of it at the time,
but, very quickly, we said that's kind of fundamental
to the reality of a kid overcoming their fears.
Sooner or later, you find out that there's nothing to be scared of
under your bed, or in your closet.
And you grow up and you overcome your fears.
DOCTER: You've overcome your fears? STANTON: I'm not saying I have,
- I'm just saying some people... - LASSETER: I still reach around
and turn on the light before I walk into every room.
STANTON: Hey, you do do that.
(ALL LAUGHING)
But it did feel like, wow, we're really tapping into a truth about kids
that can make more depth to this film
beyond just the appeal of, "Wouldn't it be cool to see a monster"
"that isn't as scary as he looks?"
DOCTER: Early on, we had an idea
that we could get actual kids to design the film in some way,
that we would base the designs on kids' drawings.
We didn't go that far, but we did pull from our own childhoods
and imagine what we thought monsters were like.
One of the real balances was finding that line between scary and appealing.
Our rule here is always,
"You're going to ask people"
"to spend an hour and a half with these characters."
"They'd better be really interesting and appealing."
"Interesting and people that you wanna spend time with."
It's like having a long dinner with somebody that you can't stand.
It gets painful.
So we try our hardest to make them as appealing as possible,
but still remain true to the idea that they are monsters.
An example of that balance is Mike has these sharp, pointy teeth,
but we didn't make them that sharp and pointy.
We kind of rounded them off and made them a little wider
so that they're just more appealing,
but still remain true to the idea that he's a monster.
STANTON: One of the interesting things about this movie
is that, in a weird way, it's the same ingredients
that we've always had in the other films,
but just slightly different proportions or uses of them.
The same people had been working on all these films from the get-go.
When we first did Toy Story, John and Joe and Pete and I, and Lee,
we all kind of realized that lucky chemistry
that comes with a great band.
There's just something that happens
when we combine all our talents and efforts together.
And our focus.
It's been really exciting to sort of shake it up
and now let Pete run with an idea he had and direct something.
But all of us get to play a role.
I got to come in as a writer, John got to be executive producer,
Lee got to come in as a co-director.
Everybody still got to have their hands in the project,
but in slightly different roles and in different amounts.
And it's been really exciting to see that
because I think it's one of the things that keeps it fresh.
We're not feeling like we're just retreading, doing the same old thing.
DOCTER: I think the mysterious thing is that a lot of people
associate that hands-all-over stuff with getting worse.
STANTON: Right, right. DOCTER: And somehow...
John, maybe you can talk about how
it gets better. I have no idea how,
but it's like, somehow, we're able to figure out, we're able to pick out,
the good ideas and the intentions behind those
so that we're not just blindly doing people's suggestions.
We're getting to the heart of the problem.
LASSETER: One of the things is, we've set up at Pixar
a working environment that is...
It doesn't matter whose idea it is.
Truly, the best idea
is the one that makes us all automatically go, "That's it." Right?
But, also, you have to...
You can't have ownership of an individual idea
because you'll come up with an idea,
then Pete will take it and go, "Yeah, yeah. And what if you did this?"
And then Andrew wouldn't even finish his sentence
and go, "And plus that." And then I would, "Plus that."
And then Joe and all this...
So, by the time you're done, it is everybody's idea.
STANTON: It really is like a band. It's like somebody started a riff
and then everybody jammed and then you got this song out of it.
It's always been that way.
UNKRICH: You know, each and every person
who works on these films with us...
I mean, these are people who are just at the top of their form.
They're the most creative, talented, artistic people you can imagine.
I, personally, feel so fortunate to show up at work every day
knowing that I get to work with them.
I just feel lucky that I get to be surrounded by these amazing people.
DOCTER: Everybody at every stage
is just the best in the world, that we know of,
the best story guys, the best shader, the best painters, the best modelers.
Everything comes together in this really great way where at every stage
the film gets better and better.
It neverjust goes along the pipeline, it gets better.
And it's really exciting.
UNKRICH: And that comes down from the top.
I mean, John Lasseter has fostered
this collaborative spirit, here at the company.
And we have him to thank for the great environment that we get to work in.
DOCTER: So, thanks a lot for listening to the commentary.
We had a lot of fun recounting all this stuff.
It's been a long process.
This film has taken a long time and there are a lot of stories to tell about it.
UNKRICH: So, hopefully, you found it interesting
and we look forward to talking to you again someday on another film.
DOCTER: That'd be great.
(SNORING)
(STANTON EXCLAIMS)
LASSETER: What? Is it over? STANTON: Oh, my gosh.
Why didn't you tell us it was over?
It must be just those two guys talking the whole time.
LASSETER: Jeez. Oh, my God, lookit, there's the castle already.
STANTON: It's over. We've got to say goodbye.
LASSETER: It was really great watching some of this with you.
This is Andrew. Bye.
This is John Lasseter saying goodbye.
STANTON: Quick before the Luxo lamp goes up. Come on, come on.
LASSETER: Sorry. Okay, bye. STANTON: Say something profound.
LASSETER: I hope you enjoyed it.
We were really happy to make Monsters, incorporated.
STANTON: Computers are really cool!