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Monsters, Inc. (Monsters, Incorporated) is a 2001 American computer-animated monster comedy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. Featuring the voices of John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Steve Buscemi, James Coburn, Mary Gibbs and Jennifer Tilly, the film was directed by Pete Docter in his directorial debut, and executive produced by John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton. The film centers on two monsters James P. "Sulley" Sullivan and his one-eyed partner and best friend Mike Wazowski who are employed at the titular energy-producing factory Monsters, Inc., which generates power by scaring human children. However, the monster world believes that the children are toxic, and when a little human girl sneaks into the factory, she must be returned home before it's too late.
Docter began developing the film in 1996, and wrote the story with Jill Culton, Jeff Pidgeon and Ralph Eggleston. 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 simulate fur and cloth realistically for the film. Randy Newman, who composed the music for Pixar's three prior films, returned to compose for its fourth.
Upon its release on November 2, 2001, Monsters, Inc. received critical acclaim and was a commercial success, grossing over $577 million worldwide to become the third highest-grossing film of 2001. The film won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for "If I Didn't Have You" and was nominated for the first Best Animated Feature, but lost to DreamWorks' Shrek, and was also nominated for Best Original Score and Best Sound Editing. Monsters, Inc. saw a 3D re-release in theaters on December 19, 2012. A prequel titled Monsters University, which was directed by Dan Scanlon, was released on June 21, 2013. A television series titled Monsters at Work premiered on Disney+ on July 7, 2021.
Voice cast
John Goodman as Sullivan, a huge, furry blue bear-like monster with horns, a tail, and purple spots. Even though he excels at scaring children, he is a gentle giant by nature. At the film's beginning, he has been the "Best Scarer" at Monsters, Inc. for several months running.
Billy Crystal as Mike, a short, round green monster with a single big eyeball and skinny limbs who is Sulley's station runner and coach on the scare floor. The two are close friends and roommates. He is charming and generally the more organized of the two, but is prone to neurotics and his ego sometimes leads him astray. He is dating Celia Mae, who calls him "Googly-Bear".
Mary Gibbs as Boo, a two-year-old human toddler girl who is unafraid of any monster except Randall, the scarer assigned to her door. She believes Sulley is a large cat and refers to him as "Kitty". In the film, one of Boo's drawings is covered with the name "Mary". The book based on the film gives Boo's "real" name as Mary Gibbs, the name of her voice actress, who is also the daughter of one of the film's story artists, Rob.
Steve Buscemi as Randall, a purple, eight-legged lizard-like monster with a chameleon-like ability to change his skin color and blend in completely with his surroundings. He is a snide and preening character who makes himself a rival to Sulley and Mike in the scream collection.
James Coburn as Waternoose, a spider-like monster with five eyes and a crab-like lower body. He is the CEO of Monsters, Inc., a job passed down through his family for three generations. He acts as a mentor to Sulley, holding great faith in him as a scarer. He is eventually revealed to be in league with Randall.
Jennifer Tilly as Celia, a pink monster with one eye and tentacle-like legs. She is the receptionist for Monsters, Inc. and Mike's girlfriend.
Bob Peterson as Roz, a snail-like monster with a raspy voice who administrates for Scare Floor F where Sulley, Mike, and Randall work.
John Ratzenberger as Yeti a.k.a. The Abominable Snowman, a furry white monster who was banished to the Himalayas. He was inspired by the Abominable Snowman from the 1964 Rankin/Bass animated special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Frank Oz as Fungus, Randall's red-skinned, three-eyed, beleaguered assistant.
Daniel Gerson as Needleman and Smitty, two goofy monsters with cracking voices who work as janitors and operate the Door Shredder when required.
Steve Susskind as floor manager, a red, seven-fingered monster who manages Scare Floor F and is a good friend of Waternoose.
Bonnie Hunt as Flint, a female monster who trains new monsters to scare children.
Jeff Pidgeon as Bile, a dinosaur-like monster who is a trainee scarer for Monsters, Inc.
Sam Black as George Sanderson, a chubby, orange-furred monster with a sole horn on top of his head. In a running gag throughout the film, he repeatedly makes contact with objects from the human world, such as a sock adhering to his fur via static cling. These incidents result in CDA agents tackling George, shaving him bald, and sterilizing him. He is good friends with Pete "Claws" Ward.
Production
The idea for Monsters, Inc., along with ideas that would eventually become A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo, and Wall-E was conceived in a lunch in 1994 attended by John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft during the near completion of Toy Story. One of the ideas that came out of the brainstorming session was a film about monsters. "When we were making Toy Story", Docter said, "everybody came up to me and said 'Hey, I totally believed that my toys came to life when I left the room.' So when Disney asked us to do some more films, I wanted to tap into a childlike notion that was similar to that. I knew monsters were coming out of my closet when I was a kid. So I said, 'Hey, let's do a film about monsters.'"
Docter began work on the film that was to 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, named for Docter's favorite restaurant in Point Richmond. 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. Docter pitched the story to Disney with some initial artwork on February 4 that year. He and his story team left with some suggestions in hand and returned to pitch a refined version of the story on May 30. 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., a play on the title of a gangster film Murder, Inc., which stuck. The film marks the first Pixar feature to not be directed by Lasseter instead being helmed by Docter, as well as Lee Unkrich and David Silverman who served as co-directors. The early test of Monsters Inc was released on October 11, 1998.
Writing
The storyline took on many forms during production. Docter's original idea featured a 30-year-old man dealing with monsters that he drew in a book as a child coming back to bother him as an adult. Each monster represented a fear he had, and conquering those fears caused the monsters to eventually disappear.
After Docter scrapped the initial concept of a 30-year-old terrified of monsters, he decided on a buddy story between a monster and a child titled simply Monsters, in which the monster character of Sulley (known at this stage as Johnson) was an up-and-comer at his workplace, where the company's purpose was to scare children. Sulley's eventual sidekick, Mike Wazowski, had not yet been added.
The idea of a monster buddy for the lead monster emerged at an April 6, 1998 "story summit" in Burbank with employees from Disney and Pixar. A term coined by Lasseter, a "story summit" was a crash exercise that would yield a finished story in only two days. Such a character, the group agreed, would give the lead monster someone to talk to about his predicament. Development artist Ricky Nierva drew a concept sketch of a rounded, one-eyed monster as a concept for the character, and everyone was generally receptive to it. Docter named the character Mike for the father of his friend Frank Oz, a director and Muppet performer. Jeff Pidgeon and Jason Katz story-boarded a test in which Mike helps Sulley choose a tie for work, and Mike Wazowski soon became a vital character in the film. Originally, Mike had no arms and had to use his legs as appendages; however, due to some technical difficulties, arms were soon added to him.
Screenwriter Daniel Gerson joined Pixar in 1999 and worked on the film with the filmmakers on a daily basis for almost two years. He considered it his first experience in writing a feature film. He explained, "I would sit with Pete [Docter] 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."
Docter has cited the 1973 film Paper Moon as inspiration for the concept of someone experiencing getting stuck with a kid who turns out to be the real expert, and he credits Lasseter for coming up with the “laughter is ten times more powerful than fear” concept.
Animation
In November 2000, early in the production of Monsters, Inc., Pixar packed up and moved for the second time since its Lucasfilm Ltd. years. 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 campus in Emeryville, co-designed by Lasseter and Steve Jobs.
In production, the film differed from earlier Pixar features, as every main character in this movie had its own lead animator – John Kahrs on Sulley, Andrew Gordon on Mike, and Dave DeVan on Boo. 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. 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, a University of California, Berkeley expert on the locomotion of heavy mammals, to lecture on the subject.
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 the 1995 film Babe. This film, however, required fur on a much larger scale. From the standpoint of Pixar's engineers, the quest for fur posed several significant challenges; one was to figure out how to animate a large number of hairs – 2,320,413 of them on Sulley – in a reasonably efficient way, and another was to make sure that the hairs cast shadows on other ones. Without self-shadowing, either fur or hair takes on an unrealistic flat-colored look (e.g., in Toy Story, the hair on Andy's toddler sister, as seen in that movie's opening sequence, is hair without self-shadowing).
The first fur test allowed Sulley to run an obstacle course. Results were not satisfactory, as such objects caught and stretched out the fur due to the extreme amount of motion. Another similar test was also unsuccessful, because, this time, the fur went through the objects.
Pixar then set up a Simulation department and created a new fur simulation program called Fizt (short for "physics tool"). After a shot with Sulley in it had been animated, this department took the data for that shot and added Sulley's fur. Fizt allowed the fur to react in a more natural way. Every time when Sulley had to move, his fur (automatically) reacted to his movements, thus taking the effects of wind and gravity into account as well. The Fizt program also controlled the movement of Boo's clothes, which provided another "breakthrough". The deceptively simple-sounding task of animating cloth was also a challenge to animate thanks to those hundreds of creases and wrinkles that automatically occurred in the clothing when the wearer moved. Also, this meant they had to solve the complex problem of how to keep cloth untangled – in other words, to keep it from passing through itself when parts of it intersect. Fizt applied the same system to Boo's clothes as to Sulley's fur. First of all, Boo was animated shirtless; the Simulation department then used Fizt to apply the shirt over Boo's body, and every time she moved, her clothes also reacted to her movements in a more natural manner.
To solve the problem of cloth-to-cloth collisions, Michael Kass, Pixar's senior scientist, was joined on Monsters, Inc. by David Baraff and Andrew Witkin and developed an algorithm they called "global intersection analysis" to handle the problem. The complexity of the shots in the film, 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, both built on Sun's own RISC-based SPARC processor architecture.
Reception
On opening day, Monsters, Inc. earned $17.8 million worldwide, then generated $26.9 million the following day, making it the second single best Saturday of all time, behind The Mummy Returns. It ranked number one at the box office, taking the spot off of K-PAX and putting it into fourth place. The film's debut led to audience declines of Thirteen Ghosts, From Hell, Riding in Cars with Boys and other films. Monsters, Inc. held the record for having opening weekend of an animated film, with $62,577,067 worldwide. The film was ranked as the biggest three-day opening weekend for a Disney film, dethroning Pearl Harbor. It was even the fourth film of the year to reach $60 million in its first three days, just after The Mummy Returns, Planet of the Apes and Rush Hour 2. The film had a small drop-off of 27.2% over its second weekend, earning another $45,551,028. In its third weekend, the film experienced a larger decline of 50.1%, placing itself in the second position just after Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. In its fourth weekend, however, there was an increase of 5.9%, making $24,055,001 that weekend for a combined $528 million. As of May 2013, it is the eighth-biggest fourth weekend ever for a film.
The film made $289,916,256 in North America, and $287,509,478 in other territories, for a worldwide $577,425,734. The film is Pixar's ninth highest-grossing film worldwide and sixth in North America. For a time, the film surpassed Aladdin as the second highest-grossing animated film of all time, only behind 1994's The Lion King.
Prequel
A prequel, titled Monsters University, was released on June 21, 2013. John Goodman, Billy Crystal, and Steve Buscemi reprised their roles of Sulley, Mike, and Randall, while Dan Scanlon directed the film. The prequel's plot focuses on Sulley and Mike's studies at Monsters University, where they start off as rivals but soon become best friends.
(Wikipedia)