Monsters, Inc. Commentary

Monsters, Inc. commentary with Director Pete Docter, Co-director Lee Unkrich, Executive producer John Lasseter and Executive producer/Co-writer Andrew Stanton.

Transcript

 * (Theme song plays)
 * 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, it's 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, and Pete and I, along with Joe Ranft, developed the story of that.
 * DOCTER: So one of the things I loved working on Toy Story was how many friends came up to me and said, "Oh, 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 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. 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 a, idea, a story or subject matter that really connects with the audience, that, that the audience can realte 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 when 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...
 * (SNAPS FINGERS)
 * DOCTER: "Dumbo," and from that point on it was just a matter of 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 envolve 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. And it was...
 * UNKRICH: Yeah, this is the very first scene that we animated.
 * DOCTER: Pretty much un, unchanged. And his boards match very closely...
 * UNKRICH: Although ironically, while this was the very first scene to go in animation, it was actually the very last scene to, 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 monsters raises up, the kid screams, and the lights went on...
 * UNKRICH: Right at this point.
 * DOCTER: Yeah. And that was it. And what we found was that people were really indentifying with the kid. So we needed something to get back at the monster and, 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 the 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. And we had a... 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. And we were constantly playing this game of how this information is too much information, and...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...the same time we wanted people to know what was going on.
 * Ms. Flint: Right... Ba ba ba ba.
 * UNKRICH: Bonnie Hunt plays fourth rant, the, the... the, 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.
 * Ms. Flint: Oh! Mr. Waternoose.
 * Mr. Waternoose: There's nothing more toxic or deadly than a human child.
 * LASSETER: We came up with the idea that the reason monsters go in to kids' rooms and scare them is they, they, they collect the scream. The kids, you know, 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 monsters' world.
 * DOCTER: That was somthing that Andrew really brought in your first draft.
 * STANTON: That, that, the scream thing just, just fit so well and had such visual potential, and it was fun. And then...
 * DOCTER: And then we really got to capitalize on the work situation.
 * STANTON: Right.
 * DOCTER: The fact that there's these slobbery, snarly beasts that clock in and clock out every day.
 * Mr. Waternoose: I need scarers like... Like James P. Sullivan.
 * 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... 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.
 * (Sulley roars)
 * 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, you know, that's just... this is the first thing they do in the morning. Is they hop into exercise.
 * Mike: Don't let him touch you!
 * (Sulley growls)
 * UNKRICH: This is also our first glimpse at the really cool architecture that was... that was created for the, for the film, the design of the film.
 * Mike: 118. Do you have 119? Do I see 120?*
 * 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, tried to make it like a, kind of a cheesy infomercial.
 * DOCTER: (CHUCKLES) Yeah. Yeah. We, we patterned it on all those wonderfully hokey power and ener, 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 kinda awkwardly produced as possible.
 * (DOCTER LAUGHING)
 * Announcer: ...challenge. The window of innocence...
 * DOCTER: We found this great announcer, Jim Thornton, who... who we felt had this great, sort of, almost a '50s retro quality to this 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: It's kind of like un, what the...
 * DOCTER: Animation.
 * UNKRICH: ...what the animation looks like when it doesn't have any lighting or shaders or anything on it.
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * Announcer: We scare...
 * DOCTER: So as we started to develop the... The story and the characters, for Sullivan we needed someone with great strength and somebody who could be like the star quaterback but also a sensitivity and, and warmth to him. And as we hit on John Goodman that was just, seemed perfect. He has this real gruffness to his voice and a strength.
 * Mike: ...camera loves me.
 * DOCTER: For Mike, Billy Crystal was, again, as we, as we thought of him, was perfect. He's got this real upbeat, bubbly, sort of a Burgess Meredith-type character to...
 * 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, and that always just really livens up the animation and makes for some great performance.
 * LASSETER: 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, to hire Tim Allen, who did an amazing job. But Billy was telling us he was kicking himself ever since for turning that down.
 * Sulley: Not really.
 * Mike: To drive it. You know, on the street with the honk...
 * DOCTER: The city here, you can see, is, is 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. So...
 * UNKRICH: So the whole thing ended up getting built really like a Hollywood backlot in terms of, you know, there's not, there's not a whole lot of city that was actually built but we really tried to maximize, you know, the use it.
 * (Fire-breathing monster sneezes)
 * Fire-breathing monster: Aw, nuts.
 * Tony: La-la-la.
 * UNKRICH: 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, 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.
 * Mike: Bada-bing.
 * (Gelatin monster screams)
 * DOCTER: Ted's roar here was originally a big loud roar from a famous movie monster, whom I won't mention here.
 * (Ted clucks)
 * DOCTER: 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.
 * UNKRICH: We, we think it's funny. (LAUGHING) It's just kind of bizarre.
 * (music plays)
 * DOCTER: As we come in 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. And I think it's really cool that it permeates this film.
 * Needleman: Hey, Mr. Sullivan.
 * 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...
 * UNKRICH: Yeah.
 * DOCTER: ...and we fell in love with it.
 * UNKRICH: It's becoming... 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 experienced with the idea that, that Mike sees all of her old boyfriends all turned to stone, which...
 * (UNKRICH LAUGHS)
 * DOCTER: ...puts the pressure on him rather to behave, but it didn't fit and it was kind of unappealing for her character.
 * Mike: I just got us...
 * UNKRICH: Jennifer Tilly does Celia's voice and she's just, just such a sweetheart and just brings such great character to Celia.
 * Mike: Not for googly...
 * 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 knew 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... which wasn't typical.
 * DOCTER: Right. And that really gave us a lot of spontaneity. They really... 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.
 * Mike: I wasn't scared.
 * UNKRICH: He's voiced by Steve Buscemi.
 * DOCTER: Yeah. Actually, when we showed him the character design, he said, "Hey, you're typecasting me."
 * (UNKRICH LAUGHS)
 * DOCTER: "There's... There's somewhat of a physical resemblance."
 * (UNKRICH LAUGHING)
 * UNKRICH: Oh. He has six arms, anyway.
 * DOCTER: (LAUGHS) Yeah.
 * Mike: That should make it more humiliating when we break the record first. Ha, ha!
 * Randall: (SUSHING) Do you hear that? It's the winds of change.
 * 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...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...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. And she was actually... Originally, she was the orientation manager at Monsters, Inc. She was such as great character then when that part got cut out, we recast her as the dispatch manager.
 * UNKRICH: I sound like a broken record here, but same deal again. We, you know, we just... We couldn't find anybody who made us laugh as much as Bob, so we ended up...
 * DOCTER: And we tried.
 * UNKRICH: ...going with Bob. We just... Yeah, we tried really hard...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: We ended up just pitching Bob up a little bit, and he's Roz.
 * Roz: ...Wazowski. Always watching.
 * DOCTER: The scare floor here, a day in the life of the scare floor, it's just so cool. I, I love the way this worked out. Lee worked really closely with David Silverman to, 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, you know, teamwork, everybody working together. And, and Randy Newman's great music is really the icing on the cake...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...in the sequence here.
 * DOCTER: What I love about it is how it's basically all visual exposition about the, 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, they're just such freaks for the details...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...and making sure everything actually could work. You almost feel like you could take their designs and, 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, "Ooh, Armageddon."
 * (BOTH LAUGHING)
 * Needleman: ...awesome.
 * DOCTER: So one of the problems in, 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. And we thought... 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. So the sign wall was really difficult, because it had... We had to track it from shot to shot, make sure that it all made sense.
 * UNKRICH: Again, people probably won't, 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. This is...
 * 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 his, at the end of the day, his totals go up one scream unit, pathetic.
 * Fungus: ...Randall. You know, maybe I should realign...
 * 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.
 * (kids screaming)
 * UNKRICH: This shot coming up here with the cart was inspired by Terry Gilliam's great film Brazil. We just... 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, yeah! And Coburn had this sort of sensitive underbelly. You really feel like the weight of the world, this factory that's, that's not doing so well now is resting squarely on his shoulders.
 * Claws: I could have...
 * DOCTER: You feel a little bad for him.
 * UNKRICH: Anyway, he has such a great warmth, like, you trust him.
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: You trust that voice, which makes it great later in the film...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...when we turn the tables and reveal that he's not such a great guy.
 * DOCTER: Shh. Don't tell them.
 * UNKRICH: Oh.
 * (DOCTER LAUGHS)
 * UNKRICH: Well, if this is the first time you're watching the movie, stop it now and turn us off.
 * (DOCTER LAUGHS)
 * Mr. Waternoose: Kids these days. They just don't get scared like they used to.
 * Needleman: Let her rip.
 * DOCTER: This... 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...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH ...Grover and a million other great characters.
 * (Sulley cracking his knuckles)
 * Sulley: Slumber party. Ha-ha.
 * Mike: Whoo!
 * (numbers beeping)
 * Celia on PA: Never mind.
 * (assistants cheering)
 * Randall: Hey, watch it.
 * 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.
 * Randall: If I don't see a new door in my station...
 * DOCTER: We had some great concept sketches of how he carries things, and how does he operate stuff, you know, 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.
 * Charlie: ...guy.
 * George: Keep the doors coming, Charlie.
 * UNKRICH: We just, 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, 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. And 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 had to... they boarded up, they came up with this sort of storm-trooper-esque idea. And it just sold like a million bucks.
 * LASSETER: That was amazing.
 * UNKRICH: Just we wanted to show just like to a ridiculous point how extreme the idea, how dangerous the idea of a kid or any element from, 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, you know, imagine if a kid ever got in. It'd be the worst thing ever, so. Of course, that's exactly what happens.
 * DOCTER: That's right.
 * George: Thanks, guys, that was a close one.
 * CDA Agent 1: Okay.
 * DOCTER: This shaving thing was a pretty hairy...
 * (UNKRICH LAUGHS)
 * DOCTER: ...technical problem, no pun intended. But I think it worked out really great. In fact, if 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.
 * UNKRICH: It's the details that count at Pixar Animation Studios. As John Lasseter likes to say, "We sand the undersides of the drawers."
 * (DOCTER LAUGHS)
 * LASSETER: There were things in Monsters, Incorporated that we could not have possibly done in, on Toy Story, A Bug's Life, or even Toy Story 2. One of the things that, that happens here at Pixar is that the, the technical development is really driven by the needs of the story. And I think in, in Monsters, Incorporated, one of the, the big things was to have furry monsters. And we started looking at real animals like, like gorillas, orangutans...
 * STANTON: Some bison and bears.
 * LASSETER: Yeah. And so we started thinking, "You know, I think it's time to maybe address this." Typically, the, the more organic something is in the way it looks or moves the more difficult it is to do, to do with computer animation.
 * Mr. Waternoose: Oh, ooh. Now that's my boy.
 * LASSETER: And so, with this one, we wanted these, these creatures, even thought they are monsters, they're completely made-up, we wanted to have it grounded in, in a sort of reality, a reality of the monster world. And we started looking at real animals and pulled, you know, textures and, and, and surfaces and so on from the real animal world. But then we combined it, which I think was one of, one of your...
 * STANTON: Yeah.
 * LASSETER: ...your big, 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. How would a kid... What would a kid think his monsters look like?" And they tend to have a little bit of a fantastical quality to them.
 * Mike: Again? You know, there's more to life than scaring.
 * DOCTER: That shot there, as Mike sniffs his armpits, that was amazing to me. He can't turn his head.
 * UNKRICH: He has no... There's no neck. Yeah.
 * DOCTER: And he has no nose.
 * UNKRICH: And we needed to sniff his armpit...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...but animator Andrew Gordon did a great job of pulling it off.
 * DOCTER: Figuring that out.
 * (Ranft growls)
 * Mike: You know, I am so romantic sometimes I think I should just marry myself.
 * Sulley: Give me a break, Mike.
 * Mike: What a night of...
 * DOCTER: So 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, you know, 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 restaged 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.
 * Celia: Want to get going?
 * Mike: Do I ever. It's just...
 * Celia: What?
 * Mike: It... A small...
 * Celia: I don't understand.
 * Sulley: It's just I forgot...
 * DOCTER: This is one of the many little improvs by Jennifer Tilly, "It's just... I don't understand." You know, just this great little thing she would throw out, and we would use, and peppered throughout.
 * UNKRICH: She had just this great coy, natural quality...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...we fell in love with.
 * Mike: ...go to Roz. (gasps) Leave the puce.
 * Sulley: Pink copies go to accounting, fuchia ones go to Roz.
 * LASSETER: This scene where Sulley lets the, the little girl into monster world has been there, really, kind of from the beginning.
 * STANTON: Yeah, it's 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, have the main character let in what the monsters fear the most.
 * STANTON: A matter of fact, I think it even drove that idea. We thought if a little kid came in 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.
 * LASSETER: Right.
 * STANTON: We had to come up with the right plot machinations.
 * LASSETER: And that great, that great twist that monsters are more scared of kids than kids are...
 * STANTON: Right.
 * LASSETER: ...of, of monsters.
 * STANTON: You never know where those big ideas are gonna come from, and that really kind of drove it. But every... You know, once that was in there, this scene has pretty much stayed the same for a long time. It's always been late at night, accidently, coming into an active door.
 * (thumping noise)
 * DOCTER: This was one 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?
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: When we first started recording her. She had like... She was at that great age where she was right on the cusp of language acquisition where, you know, she, she...
 * DOCTER: Her parents could understand her buy 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... Boo's language. You know, 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.
 * DOCTER: Right.
 * UNKRICH: 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 were Sulley was saying, "Do you understand..." And then you cut to Boo's point of view, and he's going... (SPEAKING GIBBERISH) And so on.
 * UNKRICH: That 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, in the, in the film. And as we developed it, we realized the... The younger she is the more dependent she is on, on Sullivan and, and therefore really needs his help.
 * UNKRICH: Back there were what we believe to be the first shots in computer-generated films of toilets.
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: We're very proud. We actually have several shots of toilets in this film.
 * DOCTER: Another Pixar first.
 * (Sulley sighs)
 * DOCTER: This here, this turn with Boo on his back, that was another thing that was early on a real tent pole thing that, that we stayed with and people love it. We've had screenings were people shriek.
 * UNKRICH: Yeah. At our very first preview...
 * DOCTER: Shriek.
 * UNKRICH: ...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 would... The absurdity of the idea that, you know, she sees this big huge, 8-foot tall, 1,000 pound guy and calls it, "Kitty."
 * (Boo mumbling)
 * DOCTER: I think there was some difficulty here in, in stuffing Boo into the bag and just feeling uncomfortable with that idea that, that our main character is stuffing this kid into this little thing, but it, 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.
 * (Boo squeals)
 * 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.
 * (DOCTER LAUHGS)
 * UNKRICH: 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. So... 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. Is the, the toothpick skewering the eyeball on a tray in front of them.
 * (DOCTER LAUGHS)
 * 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. You know, I can't remember why we dumped that. Maybe... You know what? Let's call Dan Gerson. Let's see if I can get him on the phone right now.
 * (DIAL TONE HUMMING)
 * (DIALING PHONE)
 * DOCTER: Let's see what he says.
 * Celia: ...sense?
 * (PHONE RINGING)
 * Sulley: Hi, guys. What a coincidence, running into you.
 * DAN GERSON: Hello?
 * DOCTER: Hi, Dan?
 * GERSON: Yeah.
 * DOCTER: This is Pete.
 * GERSON: Hey, Pete. What's going on?
 * DOCTER: How's... 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.
 * DOCTER: Okay.
 * GERSON: Shoot.
 * DOCTER: So 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: Huh. I... Ah, 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, we took out the, the marriage proposal, because it would've stepped on that.
 * DOCTER: Genius.
 * GERSON: Makes sense?
 * DOCTER: Makes sense. All right, thanks.
 * GERSON: Talk to you guys later.
 * DOCTER: Thanks, Dan.
 * GERSON: Bye.
 * (PHONE HANGS UP)
 * Sushi Chef: A kid!
 * 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.
 * UNKRICH: 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.
 * UNKRICH: And, and, 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.
 * (police siren wails)
 * UNKRICH: This whole... Having the CDA show up here is, again, just to up the ante and show how incredibly dangerous it, it was for Boo to have be, been let into the world.
 * CDA Agent 2: Only clear. Ready for decontamination.
 * UNKRICH: That's our director, Pete Docter, there.
 * DOCTER: This hallway... Or 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 actually... We've shown it to a bunch of reporters and journalists, and they were amazed how (BOTH LAUGH) dead on we got them.
 * UNKRICH: 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 remote, 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, 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 LAUGHING)
 * UNKRICH: That's... 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.
 * (Boo spits)
 * (Mike screams)
 * DOCTER: Rob Gibbs was the guy who boarded a lot of this.
 * UNKRICH: This... This sequence was actually really seminal in terms of nailing down Sulley's physical acting...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...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, 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 5, 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...
 * (UNKRICH LAUGHING)
 * DOCTER: ...that's gonna round out... It's gonna keep her from becoming just 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 everything, just 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.
 * Mike: ...do it again.
 * (Boo laughs)
 * (Sulley sushing)
 * Boo: Shh!
 * (Sulley sushes quietly)
 * (Boo sushes)
 * 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, 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 just, 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...
 * UNKRICH: It's...
 * DOCTER: ...you know, just contact. It's that extra mile.
 * UNKRICH: We sand the underside of the drawers.
 * DOCTER: That's right. This was an idea we had early on I, I, 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.
 * (UNKRICH LAUGHS)
 * DOCTER: And the cereal pouring out of the box was actually hand animated by, by frame by frame, as opposed to a dynamic simulation. It was animated by Dylan Brown.
 * (Boo cries out)
 * Boo: Ow!
 * 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 and the end of the film when he has to say goodbye to her.
 * Sulley: See?
 * (Boo screams)
 * Sulley: No monster in here. Well, now there is. I'm not gonna...
 * DOCTER: Here at this scene, we were really thinking of Sullivan as, sort of, a Walter Matthau type of guy. He's just... (IMITATING SULLEY) Grumble, grumble. I like the idea that he, he effortlessly scrapes these huge bricks...
 * UNKRICH: Cinderblocks.
 * DOCTER: ...cinderblocks over there and just kinda does it without even thinking. Just nudges it with his fingers. Shows his strength.
 * Sulley: You, go, 2...
 * UNKRICH: We had to animate an alternate version of that shot John, John Kahrs did for the international market, since it's so tied to kinda the English with him...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...holding up the two fingers.
 * DOCTER: Boo falling right asleep was an idea that we had in, 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.
 * Sulley: Hey, Mike. This might sound crazy, bud I don't think that kid's dangerous.
 * Mike: Really? Well, in that case, let's keep it. I always...
 * DOCTER: Randy was a really great collaborator on this show, and brought a lot of richness to the film in his orchestration, in his, 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, 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, is a matte painting, the giant door vault back there.
 * Sulley: Hey. How you doing, Frank?
 * Frank: Hey, guys.
 * Sulley: Everything's going to be okay.
 * (gasps)
 * (CDA's devices whirring)
 * 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, with, 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.
 * Sulley: She can't stay here. This is the men's...
 * UNKRICH: This... This little scene here is, is really just a setup for the great scene that follows, where Boo is sitting in the stall, having her little potty break.
 * DOCTER: Yeah. 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 wanna... You want another song?" She'd keep singing and she was a little older by then, by this time.
 * UNKRICH: So we took... Yeah. So we took all that stuff back to the editing room and, and nipped and tucked and pieced together, kind of, a whole gibberish version of the song. And it's funny, this, this whole song, it's been kind of like a Rorschach test for, for people's psychologies, 'cause everybody hears different things in the song, and, and there really seems to be no consensus...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...about what she's actually singing.
 * DOCTER: "She will save mankind." Different things...
 * UNKRICH: And I think she says, "Lemon yellow kind."
 * (DOCTER LAUGHING)
 * DOCTER: Toilet flush was one of the first effects that we had, wasn't it?
 * UNKRICH: Actually...
 * DOCTER: Was it this scene or is it a different one?
 * UNKRICH: It was actually earlier but it's stunning.
 * DOCTER: Okay.
 * UNKRICH: It's... 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.
 * (DOCTER LAUGHS)
 * UNKRICH: We go to the lavatory.
 * DOCTER: Yeah, that's right.
 * (Boo snickers)
 * DOCTER: This is one of the cheats. One of the really, the 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. (LAUGHS) 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 the fangs and the way monsters would build them.
 * UNKRICH: Like, yeah, you know, the handles on the cabinets back there are like horns...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...and the tape dispenser. You see that everywhere. You see that all at the beginning of the film in Monstropolis. All the little subtle details in the, 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...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...and see all the great work that went into them.
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * CDA Agent: All right, carry on.
 * DOCTER: 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 kinda 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, he camouflages by grabbing elements of the background and, 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.
 * Fungus: The child, may have escaped!
 * Randall: Yeah, well, until we know for sure we're gonna act like nothing happened...
 * UNKRICH: More great performance from... 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...
 * (DOCTER LAUGHS)
 * UNKRICH: ...Grover or...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...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 they... I think they really pushed each other.
 * UNKRICH: Mmm-hmm.
 * Boo: Ew.
 * DOCTER: This bit of toilet paper stuck to Mike's foot, Mark Henne was responsible for, and it was actually very difficult...
 * UNKRICH: It's those little...
 * DOCTER: ...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 dynamics... It wasn't hand... Key framed 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: Oh, like the "top of the morning" stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was in the lobby, and I think we switched it to this place.
 * LASSETER: It was always so funny.
 * STANTON: Yeah.
 * LASSETER: The way that John and, and Billy just were... It was absolutely hilarious. "Did you lose a limb? You lose weight, a limb or something?" I just love that.
 * STANTON: Right.
 * LASSETER: And so we had to use it, and it fit perfectly here.
 * STANTON: Yeah, it kept, 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.
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: And it was really funny stuff, but we couldn't get the rights to it. It was such an old recording, they just, they 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...
 * (DOCTER LAUGHS)
 * UNKRICH: ...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...
 * (UNKRICH IMITATING SULLEY)
 * DOCTER: ...with Mike... And it, it really works great. It, it, you know, ties everything together. These guys are on the same page. They're... 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, that was really great to bring to the show.
 * Mike: ..hey. Where are you going? Sulley, please, don't blow this. Not when we're so close to breaking the record.
 * UNKRICH: I love this idea of Randall bumping into Sulley and, kind of, momentarily taking on his texture here.
 * Randall: What are you two doing?
 * UNKRICH: It's kind of the only time that happens in the film, but it's a great idea.
 * Mike (singing): She's out of our hair!
 * Randall: Can it, Wazowski! So, what do you think of that kid getting out...
 * STANTON: You know, I remember Randall not having a schtick early on and, and, and me just saying, "Can he do something cool, like a, like a, chameleon? Like, can he turn into something?" And of course, technically, we could not do that, but it, it got everybody thinking, and, 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."
 * LASSETER: But, but with, with, with the technology, you can, you... 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, you know, like Felix the Cat's magic bag or something?"
 * STANTON: Right.
 * LASSETER: "Or should it be like, you know, should it be let it sort of him standing still?" But when we finally came up with, with the right combination, it really was, was so special, 'cause it was kind of creepy. It meant like he could be anywhere. You know?
 * STANTON: Yes. Exactly.
 * LASSETER: You can't talk about Randall, 'cause he could be invisible right behind you.
 * UNKRICH: 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 there comes Randall.
 * Randall: ...factory, isn't it?
 * Mike: You're not pending this on me.
 * DOCTER: 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.
 * Randall: Everyone goes to...
 * 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, 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 through, looking at a mirror. It's like a one-way mirror, and he's actually kinda picking something out of his teeth, but Mike thinks he's been caught, so he essentially just gives himself up.
 * (DOCTER LAUGHS)
 * UNKRICH: 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 gridwork 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 placards, you know, on the wall there. 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, in the trash cube was, 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.
 * Ms. Nesbitt: What's your name?
 * Boo: Mike Wazowski.
 * (machine pounding)
 * DOCTER: This whole section is borrowed, shall we say, from one of all of our favorite cartoons. And so we, we took the basic idea of that and, and...
 * UNKRICH: Doug Sweetland animated all those shots on Sulley, right?
 * DOCTER: Yeah. 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, you know, real anguish, because that would be kind of a downer. So we...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...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.
 * Mike: Sulley!
 * UNKRICH: This... This sequence of Mike running around trying to find Sulley was, used to be a longer sequence. There was some, 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.
 * (toys squeak)
 * DOCTER: I don't remember who had the idea of CDA all in the toilet stalls, but it really cracked us up.
 * (UNKRICH LAUGHS)
 * UNKRICH: Hey, everybody's gotta go sometime.
 * DOCTER: That's right. We figured they have hoses that detach. That don't actually unzip their suits.
 * UNKRICH: And that's all the detail we're going to go into.
 * DOCTER: That's right.
 * Mike: ...pal. I got us a way out of this mess, but we gotta hurry.
 * DOCTER: So Sulley's here with the cube. This, again, is Brett Coderre animation and, 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.
 * Mike: How many kids you got in there?
 * Monster kids: Mike Wazowski.
 * 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, when they're not acting, and they don't know what they're doing or that you don't know you're recording them. You get just, kind of, a great real, charming quality to the voice.
 * Ms. Nesbitt: My, what an affectionate father.
 * Sulley: Actually, she's my, my cousin's sister's...
 * Mike: Okay, Sulley. That's enough. Let's go.
 * DOCTER: So this character here, the voice was the daughter of Joe Ranft. Joe is, a great, 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 of the...
 * UNKRICH (IMITATES SOPHIA): "Mike Akowski."
 * 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.
 * Mike: Okay, Let's move, let's move, let's move. Come on. Oh, please be there. Please be there.
 * DOCTER: So the lighting here on the scare floor is really great. We based it on a cathedral or Grand Central Station. You know, that light, 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, you basically... It's like looking at the entire movie, and, and it's very close to how all the individual shots ended up getting lit. They're, you know, they're just like pieces of art in their own right.
 * DOCTER: Hopefully you have the chance to see those on this very disc.
 * (Boo whimpers)
 * (Sulley sushes)
 * UNKRICH: One of the reasons for this scene being here is that we thought it would be really cool to, to have a scene where, where Randall camouflages and, and we don't know where he is. And 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, and just really let this moment be really kinda chilling.
 * DOCTER: Gary Rydstrom had an idea to, every time Randall camouflages, to use just a little bit of sound and from what he's camouflaging into. So, you can hear the cans kind of clink as he disappears.
 * (bell ringing)
 * 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, we were worried that thing, it was gonna start to feel, you know, 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.
 * LASSETER: But...
 * STANTON: I'm to blame.
 * LASSETER: 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, that 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, there, one of, and the way to get, it actually covered the hall that, that brought you to the secret lair, and if you ordered Juicy Fright, it would open up and you'd go down." And, and it worked for a long time, but then as the more we decided to leave the audience out of the know that 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 high-tech. It had to be low-tech. Had to be sort of this makeshift door.
 * LASSETER: And, and, and more inconspicuous.
 * STANTON: Yes.
 * LASSETER: Because, I mean, with the candy machine there you'd think...
 * STANTON: Somebody would have fixed it.
 * LASSETER: Yeah. Somebody would have wanted the candy and fixed it, and all like that.
 * STANTON: It seemed good on paper.
 * LASSETER: Okay, 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 interesting. We knew we wanted to have this whole maze network of pipes everywhere and we didn't wanna have to build them all kind of, you know, 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, 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, they're very flexible.
 * UNKRICH: So it's basically like having a big Tinkertoy set of, 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...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...making stands for lamps and all kinds of things.
 * Mike: Wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Oh, come on. No, no, no, no, no, no.
 * DOCTER: The lighting in this section, I think, is, works really great. And one of the ideas behind it is that the, 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.
 * (scream extractor whirring)
 * UNKRICH: The scream extractor design is really, really cool because it's, 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, and it's not, 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, this horrible machine.
 * DOCTER: Yeah. They're just doing this on their own, you think, at the time, and they're, they're building it out of spare parts. That's the side of the door, the, 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, with Randall.
 * DOCTER: So this was a Dan Gerson line. He was one of our writers on the show. The... The car thing, which I always thought was really funny.
 * Mike: ...a ride in the car.
 * DOCTER: 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.
 * DOCTER: That's right.
 * UNKRICH: We had a version of the scene later on where he comes back and rescues Boo, where he, 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. To, just what was the funniest, you know, in terms of the redness and puffiness, and ended up here.
 * Sulley: Come on.
 * Mike: This is crazy. He's gonna kill us.
 * CDA Agent: Careful with that. That could be contaminated.
 * Mike: We gotta get out of here now! We could start a whole new life...
 * 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.
 * Computer voice: Simulation terminated.
 * Mr. Waternoose: No, no, no, no, no. What was that? You're trying to scare the kid, not lull it...
 * DOCTER: Here we're back to the tryout room where Thaddeus is trying once again to do, do a good job.
 * UNKRICH: That's Jeff Pidgeon. One of our great story guys did the voice of Thaddeus Bile, and Jeff also... His most famous part was as the little squeeze toy aliens in the Toy Story films.
 * Sulley: No, no, sir. You don't understand.
 * Mr. Waternoose: Ah, now. Show these monsters how it's done.
 * Sulley: What? No, no. I can't, I can't. Sir, sir.
 * DOCTER: So this was a really tricky part of the film. Sullivan ends up scaring Boo without knowing it. And we had, 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, the, 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, you know, we made the changes necessary to have the scene play out that way, and, you know, it was just... There's a just much more visceral impact to the, to the moment of Sulley scaring Boo the way we ended up restaging it.
 * DOCTER: It's funny, there's a lot going on in this scene. There's a lot of exposition of Mike saying, oh, that Randall has this plot and he has to tell Waternoose about it and then 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 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...
 * UNKRICH: Right.
 * DOCTER: ...that carries it.
 * 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, you know, 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, and we wanted Sulley to, kind of, feel those parental feelings at this moment.
 * Mr. Waternoose: Does anyone else know about this?
 * DOCTER: So, once again, even though there's all this exposition going on of, "Oh, it's... I can't believe this happened to 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, 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, both to bring in the, 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.
 * Mr. Waternoose: It's yours.
 * (Sulley gasps)
 * (Mike gasps)
 * 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: This... That's exactly what always happens, is eventually we turn back into audiences of our own film, and we just go, 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, 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.
 * LASSETER: Yeah, you want, you want the audience just to go, "Okay, how are they gonna get back now?"
 * STANTON: Right. Right.
 * (Mike and Sulley growl)
 * (Mike gasps)
 * Yeti: Welcome to the Himalayas.
 * UNKRICH: 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, 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, go on, back to the...
 * UNKRICH: And it just... It was just too easy. It was too easy in such a short scene to, 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...
 * DOCTER, LASSETER: Lingonberry jam.
 * DOCTER: 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, 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?"
 * STANTON: Yeah, he had some jam.
 * DOCTER: "Some terrified mountain climbers left it behind."
 * LASSETER: I remember when we first came up with the idea for the snow cones.
 * STANTON: Mmm-hmm.
 * LASSETER: We said we wanted them to be yellow and, and to, to have him go, "Oh, no, no, no, it's lemon," you know.
 * STANTON (LAUGHING): Right.
 * LASSETER: We, we loved that. And what's interesting is, 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, much detail in them.
 * STANTON: Yeah.
 * LASSETER: 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."
 * STANTON: Yeah.
 * LASSETER: And she insisted, and they did. They made them look fantastic.
 * STANTON: Bright yellow.
 * LASSETER: Yeah, bright yellow, and it looks like a snow cone. Where the... You know, it, it has all the, the ice.
 * STANTON: Yeah. Crystallized and everything.
 * LASSETER: And...
 * STANTON: For those of you raised in the northern hemisphere, you'll know that this, that was accurate, you know.
 * LASSETER: And what's, what's very funny is, 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...
 * LASSETER: Yeah.
 * STANTON: ...a shade of yellow will make.
 * LASSETER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: It was kind of an 11th hour addition, and, and I think it's pretty hilarious.
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * Yeti: Oh-ho. Would you look at that? We're out of snow cones. Let me just go outside and make some more.
 * UNKRICH: In addition to boarding this scene tons of times, we actually recorded it quite a few times with, with John Goodman and Billy Crystal. And in those early versions, the, you know, this scene just wasn't working, and you could tell the, the two of them being great actors, were really struggling with this scene, because it just wasn't, 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, they, 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.
 * Sulley: But Boo's in trouble.
 * DOCTER: The lighting and the shaders in this scene are really beautiful. We worked hard to get a sort of backlit translucency to the, 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, to get the shaders to look right, to smooth. Again, the, 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, you know, putting music in everywhere...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...and I think this scene is much more effective by not having any music.
 * DOCTER: This whole scene was an idea that, that Lee had to, 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: And the goal was to just make as, 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, 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, it's, it's really, really cool.
 * (distant child screaming)
 * DOCTER: Here, we go back to George.
 * Charlie: Oh, come on, now, George. I know you can do this. I picked out an easy...
 * UNKRICH: That's Phil Proctor from the Firesign Theatre doing the voice of... Charlie. ...of Charlie.
 * George: Here. Take this.
 * Charlie: Go get 'em, Georgie.
 * Sulley: Gangway. Look out.
 * DOCTER: Finally, George gets his, 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.
 * Light green monster: Hey!
 * Boo (whimpers): Don't!
 * Mr. Waternoose: Finally.
 * UNKRICH: We actually used to have whole extended sequence here, where Sullivan ran down, and he thought he was bursting into the room where Boo was, but he actually burst in 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...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...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, he was in a cage room instead.
 * UNKRICH: Right, and it was cool. It was cool, this idea that this, 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...
 * DOCTER: Yeah. I mean, she's...
 * UNKRICH: ...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 opper... 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, "Oh, 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 a real, seen as a really dangerous character to Sulley. And, 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, 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...
 * UNKRICH: You wanna...
 * DOCTER: ...have that tension and drama.
 * UNKRICH: You wanna have the threat...
 * DOCTER: Right.
 * UNKRICH: ...and danger of Randall, but not have it be to violent.
 * DOCTER: Yeah, I also love this idea that Randall's exposed by being hit by the snowball. That's where you can...
 * UNKRICH: Accidentally.
 * DOCTER: ...finally see... Finally see where he is.
 * Mike: Ohh.
 * Sulley: Come on.
 * Mr. Waternoose: Get up.
 * DOCTER: 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, 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: ...send her back, but Waternoose had a secret plot, and now Randall's right behind us and he's trying to kill us!
 * DOCTER: "Mike Wazowski," that's another one of the words that Mary Gibbs actually had to say. I think she says, "Mike Wazowski."
 * UNKRICH: Kitty.
 * DOCTER: "Boo" and "Kitty."
 * UNKRICH: Yeah. And that's about it.
 * Mike: Look out, coming through here, coming through.
 * Sulley: Sorry.
 * Mike: Make way. Move it.
 * DOCTER: So here we were really trying to involve... Everybody really loved Celia as, as we were developing her as a character as this story was coming together, trying to use her to defeat Randall in some way.
 * UNKRICH: We wanted to give her kinda 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?" So...
 * (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, with Jennifer Tilly to set up that idea.
 * Sulley: We have to get Boo's door and find a station.
 * DOCTER: So as soon as we came up with an idea that the monsters scare kids through the closet door, we knew than then, somewhere, there needed to be a place where they housed, you know, I think we did calculations of like 36,000,000 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: Yeah. (LAUGHING) This vault is taller than the Empire State Building, and it's, I think, a half a mile long.
 * UNKRICH: You can actually fit, we figured out, a Statue of Liberty on any one given level...
 * DOCTER: Oh, yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...of the door vault.
 * DOCTER: 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 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 base.
 * DOCTER: Yeah, and Bruno actually wrote all the music for the other international rooms, as well.
 * Sulley: ...find another door.
 * DOCTER: All the rooms that we go into and out of in this section are, 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... This whole sequence, I think, is a real tour de force for everyone concerned. It was, it was a real challenge from a layout perspective in terms of designing all the staging and the camera movement and compositions. We... 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, it allows us to create some really great dynamic scenes and dynamic staging.
 * (Sulley and Mike laugh)
 * 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.
 * Randall: Nice working...
 * DOCTER: Sullivan's fur is 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 not... It's, it's a dynamic thing, so the animators are kind of like the actors in their show. They bring the personality, the, the performance to the, to the character. And they worked with, basically, a bald version of Sullivan.
 * UNKRICH: Yeah. You don't want them to get bogged down in kind of the physics of how hair moves. You just want them...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...to concentrate on the performance.
 * DOCTER: 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, 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, the idea of the two worlds colliding here at this threshold, you see a kid's room careening through space in the, 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...
 * DOCTER: In the film that we do it.
 * UNKRICH: ...in the film that we do it, and it's, it's really cool.
 * Randall: ...for too long, Sullivan. Now your time is up.
 * UNKRICH: This is another change that we made kind of late in the game, was kind of really pumping up this Randall's comeuppance and, 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, 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, and letting Boo kind of have a, a real triumph over her fears and over, over Randall.
 * Sulley: ...scared of you anymore.
 * (Boo roars)
 * 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. (CHUCKLES)
 * Sulley: That's right, Boo. You did it.
 * 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.
 * Sulley: ..good girl, okay?
 * (gasps)
 * DOCTER: So Mike's move that brings down the house, we had animated. Shawn... Shawn Krause, one of the animators on the show, he's, he'd done, I think, three or four different moves that he could have done, just little kinds of dance steps, and maybe one. 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.
 * Mike: What's happening?
 * Sulley: Hold on.
 * Mr. Waternoose: When the door lands in the station, cut the power. You'll have the child and the criminals...
 * UNKRICH: This... The scenes coming up here, where, where Mike kinda fakes everybody out by throwing, 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, well, it's Boo's sock." Well, Boo was wearing both of her socks for the rest of the film, so we, 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... Another two weeks..."
 * 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.
 * (UNKRICH LAUGHS)
 * DOCTER: And there, Boo has bare feet for the rest of the film.
 * UNKRICH: Some great Doug Sweetland animation here of Waternoose, really, turning him completely...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: ...from a grandfatherly trusted character into a really powerful, violent, scary guy.
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * (steam hissing)
 * (Mr. Waternoose grunts)
 * 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 make Waternoose, 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 know... We know, 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, 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.
 * Computer voice: ...terminated. Simulation terminated.
 * Mike: Well, I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I spotted several big mistakes.
 * DOCTER: This monitor bank of, it's 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, 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 the pause effect and all that.
 * UNKRICH: It does look cool.
 * Mr. Waternoose: Because of you!
 * (doors slam)
 * CDA Agent: Stay where you are. Number one wants to talk to you.
 * 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.
 * Roz: ...Sullivan. Of course...
 * UNKRICH: I think this is some of Bob Peterson's finest work, as the voice of Roz.
 * DOCTER: That's right.
 * (CDA Agents breathing)
 * Roz: Now...
 * DOCTER: 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.
 * Roz: I'll give you five minutes.
 * DOCTER: 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. And, and... 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, part of life, and I think it's something that people relate to, or that, that adults relate to when they watch this film.
 * (Boo giggles)
 * UNKRICH: When... When Randy Newman first played us this solo piano version of, of, 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, 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, yeah...
 * Sulley: Kitty has to go.
 * UNKRICH: It just... 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 7% as he 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, is a nice painting done by Glenn Kim, who's one of our, one of our painters on the show.
 * (machine wirring)
 * DOCTER: 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, 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, the truck driving away.
 * UNKRICH: Roger Rose animated this shot with all the characters, and he's, 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.
 * Mike: ...you should have seen the look on Waternoose's face. Woo-hoo! I hope we get a...
 * DOCTER: 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.
 * Mike: ...right?
 * DOCTER: These shots we tried to mimic, as closely as possible, the exact same shot from the beginning of the film.
 * UNKRICH: And it's the same score and everything at this moment.
 * DOCTER: 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, 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, 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, this whole kind of gross-out idea with the belch.
 * (Mike's belly rumbling)
 * UNKRICH: '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.
 * Mike: Remember to tip your waitresses.
 * UNKRICH: When all else fails, belch.
 * DOCTER: So the scare floor here is, 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 singage 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, our CEO, Steve Jobs' other company...
 * DOCTER: That's right.
 * UNKRICH: ...Apple Computer.
 * Mike: Woah.
 * (snakes chittering)
 * Celia: Girls. Girls, girls, stop...
 * DOCTER: So 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, there, whenever Mike opened the box, it was just an image of the sushi bar, and it made absolutelt no sense. And... (LAUGHS) We, we knew what was gonna be on the cover ultimately, but it was literally months before we finally got it rendered with that, with that magazine cover on it.
 * DOCTER: This...
 * UNKRICH: The moment finally made sense.
 * Fungus: Oh...
 * DOCTER: I love the idea that Thaddeus is now using his failed scare to amuse kids, you know, at the end of the film.
 * UNKRICH: It's also really cool, I don't think people immediately recognize it, but the, you know, because laughter is so much more powerful than, than scream, we now have these huge tanks...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH... to hold the more powerful sream.
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * UNKRICH: It's... 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, 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, a difficult balancing act to pull that off, because...
 * DOCTER: It's a scrap of...
 * UNKRICH: Yeah. ...people get a sense that the movie is ending, but, you know, we really wanted this, this, this reunion here at the end to have a lot of emotional impact, and if we had rushed into it, it just, it wouldn't have had the same feeling that it has.
 * Mike: ...works if you have every piece.
 * 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, 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... 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 our job well because the audience wanted to see her so badly.
 * DOCTER: Leave them wanting more.
 * Sulley (singing): If I were a rich man...
 * 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, you know, kids are scared in their bedrooms, in the dark. They're afraid of monsters coming out of their closets. And so, when we started getting into the story, it was, 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. And... It's, it's fun to, you know, 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: And it's kinda... I don't think we were conscious of it at the time, but, very quickly, we said that's kind of fundamental to just, the reality of a kid come, 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, and you overcome your fears. And so...
 * LASSETER: You... You've... You've overcome your fears?
 * STANTON: I'm not saying I have, I'm just saying some people...
 * LASSETER: I still... I still reach around...
 * (STANTON LAUGHING)
 * LASSETER: ...and turn on the light before I walk into every room.
 * STANTON: Hey, you do do that.
 * (ALL LAUGHING)
 * STANTON: 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?"
 * Mike (singing): Nothing to me...
 * DOCTER: Early on, we had an idea that maybe we could get actual kids to design the film, you know, 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 htat line between scary and appealing. And