Cast _* Story _* Interesting Facts _* Interviews _* Making Of

Directed by: Pete Docter & David Silverman
Written by: Andrew Stanton & Dan Gerson
Music by: Randy Newman

Production started on: May 4, 1999
Release Date: November 2, 2001
Running Time: 95 minutes

Budget: $100 million (and another $100 million for prints and advertising)
Box-Office: $234.23 million in the U.S., $ million worldwide
 
 

CAST
 
 

Boo... Mary Gibbs
James P. Sullivan... John Goodman
Mike Wzowski... Billy Crystal
Henry J. Waternoose... James Coburn
Celia... Jennifer Tilly
Randall Boggs... Steve Buscemi
Roz... Bob Peterson
and Bonny Hunt
 
 
 
 

STORY

Horrible creatures live in a parallel dimension right next door to our world.  The key difference between our world and theirs? In the monster's dimension, they don't use gasoline, oil, or electricity to power their machinery. They need the screams of small children to keep the wheels of industry rolling.

Monsters, Incorporated is the largest scare factory in the monster world and James P. Sullivan (voiced by John Goodman) is one of its top Scarers. Monsters must audition for a spot and then are transported under the bed and must capture screams. Jim and his close pal, Mike Wzowski (voiced by Billy Crystal, both shown above) sneak into our world every night. They burst out of closets and/or sneak out from under beds. All in an effort to scare some kids so that Jim and Mike can collect their screams and bring this all important energy source back into the monster realm.  There is one rule though: Never Bring Back A Child!

Jim is highly thought of in the monster world. His boss, Henry J. Waternoose (voiced by James Coburn) praises him. Mr. Waternoose's secretary, Celia (voiced by Jennifer Tilly) adores him. Jim's on top of the world, at the top of his game ... until he and Mike make one small mistake. One awful night, they accidentally let a 3-year old human girl named Boo (voiced by Mary Gibbs) follow them back through the portal.

Jim and Mile are immediately punished by being exiled to our dimension. There they find out that the monsters of our urban legends like Bigfoot, Nessie, and Yeti are also exiled monsters.  Eventually, the heroes realize that not only screams power their homeworld but so does laughter...
 
 
 
 

INTERESTING FACTS

  Another title used early in this film's development was The Hidden City -the name of a restaurant across the street from Pixar's headquarters!

  Monsters, Inc. was in pre-production for close to two years before it was officially started.

  It is taken from a short movie that producer John Lasseter did in college, called Monsters, and that won a student Emmy.  It was about a little boy who was afraid to turn off his bedroom lights at night because the shadows would turn into monsters. So when the lights would go out and the monsters would appear, he would turn the light back on. Well, he started flicking the light switch so fast once, that one of the monsters didn't have the chance to disappear, so it now was stuck in the boy's "real world". In a cute moment, both the boy AND the monster got scared of each other and both jumped under the boy's bed covers. After a little time, they both became friends and the little boy became buddies with all of the monsters in his room.

  Steve Buscemi's casting as the voice of one of the monsters was rumored since the project went in production, in May 1999.  All other cast members were only announced on August 10, 2000.

  John Ratzenberger (the Yeti of the Himalayas) is a Pixar regular who previously voiced Hamm the Piggy Bank in the Toy Story films and Flea in A Bug's Life.

  "We like to start with something universal, like in Toy Story -- all kids imagine their toys can walk and talk," Pete Docter says. "So we came up with monsters in the closet. All kids think there's a monster hiding in the closet."  John Lasseter is very big on story. "You have to get the story right," he says. "No computer or animated effects can save a bad story. We spend a good chunk of time just getting the story right -- 2, 2 1/2 years. "Animation is too expensive. Essentially, we have to edit the film in advance of producing it. We first produce a version using still drawings. We also produce versions of the movie using storyboards." Once the story is fleshed out, it's time for the actors to start recording dialogue. "We record them over 12 to 15 sessions of about four hours each every few months," Pete Docter says. "It's a real challenge, actingwise." John Lasseter adds: "The thing we always do is match the voice and personality to the character. We want it to sound natural, so we never ask the actors to do a character voice. We want it to appeal to us, to the adults in the audience, too, to make it be a real movie, to find that balance." Because the scenes haven't been animated at the time of the recording sessions, the actors are free to ad-lib. "The great thing is that this is relaxed," assistant director Lee Unkrich says. "We try to foster an atmosphere where the actors can be really creative and loose." In deciding what ad-libs to use and what to discard, the filmmakers try to remember their first response. "We like things that make us laugh the first time we hear it," Lasseter says. "Eventually, we'll hear everything 500,000 times, but if we remember that first time, we're pretty sure it will make the audience laugh, too."

  For the voice of Boo, Pete Docter started with Mary Gibbs, the two-and-a-half year old daughter of Ron Gibbs, one of the lead story artists at Pixar. The voice worked so well, they decided to keep it. "In the sound editing," Docter says, "we manipulated the syllables so it all sounds like indistinguishable child gibberish." Says her father, "Now that she’s five and has seen promos and trailers for the film, it’s just starting to sink in that she’s in a movie." She's apparently proud of it, her dad adds, saying, "my wife recently overheard her telling her friends in pre-school, ‘I’m in a movie.’"

  Says Bob Peterson, a Pixar story supervisor on the film who ended up voicing the slug-like Roz, "at first, I was just doing her voice as a scratch track... they did recordings with some real actresses but Pete [Docter] and the others just weren’t laughing as much."

  During voice recordings, the script changed from time to time so one week he would tell John Goodman "so Sullivan is a janitor now" and the next month "now he's the best scarer on the floor." Luckily says director Pete Docter, John Goodman "was very patient with us. He rolls with the punches."

  John Goodman enjoyed acting with only his voice: "You don’t have to shave. You read into a microphone... I just showed up and read!"

  The computer-animation pioneers at Pixar had wanted Crystal as the voice of Buzz Lightyear for the original Toy Story back in the mid- '90s. But Crystal's pal Robin Williams had been feuding with Disney over publicity for Aladdin, and Crystal's manager advised him against voicing Buzz. "The biggest mistake I ever made in my life," Crystal calls it. "Only thing I ever turned down that I felt [bad] about. I voted for Toy Story as Best Picture and I was the stupid guy who said, 'I don't want to be Buzz Lightyear!' way back then." When Lasseter called again three years ago for Monsters, Inc., Robin Williams had settled with Disney and Billy Crystal was ready to agree before he even knew what his role would be. He remembers joking with Lasseter: "Whatever it is -- unless it's a fundraiser to help animated kids -- yes!"

  Billy Crystal explained in an October 2001 interview how he and co-star John Goodman broke animation protocol by recording their roles together in the same room. "I did the first session alone--the first two, I think--and I said, 'You know, this is terrible,'" Crystal said in an interview while promoting the Disney/Pixar co-production. Director Pete Docter "kept wanting all different line readings of the same line... Why am I doing all of these? He said, 'Well, in case I change the scene around, and I'll get John to do it.' I said, 'Isn't that just silly? When we can be together and do it together and play the scenes?' And that's what we did." Typically, actors who do voices for animation record their parts individually and never meet their co-stars. But Monsters, Inc. took a chance, allowing its two principals to work together and improvise off each other for virtually all their scenes together, Crystal said. Much of that spontaneous banter makes it into the final film. "They brought him in," Crystal said. "And for whatever reasons, they'd never done it before. And it was great. Because then we were really acting with each other. And then they videotape us. And so, John and I are looking at each other, and playing, like actors. So then, the animators, as genius as they are, are able to take our faces, and put that real emotion into these characters, and then you give a performance. I never felt I was giving a voice-over job. I felt I was acting. And then when you see the movie, and you're moved by it, if you were, it's because the acting comes through these faces. It's an extraordinary compliment to them that they can do that. ... And grab how good your acting can be, and you're not losing anything."

  Of the creation of Monstropolis, director Pete Docter comments, "We knew we could do just about anything design-wise. We started with buildings that could move and talk and we had some strange architecture that got really weird. (Executive Producer) John Lasseter pushed us to think in terms of a more reliable Monster World, like our own cities, only designed for monsters. They've got huge buildings built of steel and stone because they need to accommodate 3-ton guys walking around. And everything from doors to telephones to cars have to be multipurpose in order to handle everyone from 8-foot monsters to little guys who are only 2 inches tall."

  To capture a look and logic for Monstropolis, Pete Docter sent production designers Harley Jessup and Bob Pauley on research trips to factories, refineries, assembly plants, blimp hangars, and industrial towns. This included a trip to Pittsburgh to examine the layout and inner-workings of an older company town. Jessup explains, "We envisioned the Monsters, Inc. factory as sort of a '60s era modernist building and the surrounding city has buildings over 100 years old. The notion was that the turn-of-the-century factory had been torn down and (the Monsters Inc. factory) was put up in the 1960s during the heyday of the baby boom. Monsters Inc. is now about 40 years old and feeling outdated and a bit run down. There is an energy shortage going on now (due to the fact that it's tougher to scare kids these days) and business isn't what it used to be." He adds, "We were trying to make sure that the monsters would be the most colorful things in Monstropolis, so we made the city somewhat muted and the factory a bit on the cool side colorwise. The brighter colors were saved for the characters themselves so that they would really stand out. Our goal was to elevate the color rhythms of the film and make sure we were saving different colors and light qualities for the most dramatic moments."

  A first teaser was presented in the Deluxe DVD edition of Toy Story on October 6, 2000.  A full trailer was first shown on June 8, 2001.

  Disney executives asked the production team to done down the scariest element of the movie -they didn't want kids to be frightened by the characters and therefore not want to buy plush toys.

  The movie was pushed back from a summer 2001 to a November 2001 release, in August 2000.  Moreover, rumours flew in early November 2000 that Monsters Inc. was way behind schedule and didn't look set to make its November 2001 release date. Supposedly the reason for the slow progress was a lack of manpower: Pixar doesn't have enough people on board to cover the extensive amount work needed to complete the project on time. Another possible reason for its rumoured delay is Pixar's planned move from their existing facilities in Richmond, CA to Emeryville.

  Disney is looking to take the potential wind out of Harry Potter's sails by making a big move up. Previously scheduled to hit screens for the Thanksgiving weekend, the studio has pushed up the release date of Monsters, Inc. to November 2, which would be 2 weeks prior to the release of Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone on Nov. 16.

  A week before the movie's release, director Pete Docter admitted he wasn't ready to commit to a follow-up just yet, despite industry buzz about a sequel. "I would have to think about that and see what happens. At this point I'm relieved to be done with this film. It's been a long process. I'm happy with the film, but I haven't thought about a sequel." When asked if he would work for Pixar again, actor Billy Crystal answered he was already psyched to do a sequel: "In a second! It's so unique an experience because you're working in the dark and you just trust. But you're in the hands of the best people to do this -- so that's a great thing. It's so astounding what you can accomplish, the good that you can do!"

  Outtakes were released on December 7, a month after the movie's release, in time for the holidays, in order to generate repeat business. At that time, Monsters was starting to seriously lose steam at the box-office and the prospect of topping Shrek's record was getting thinner every day.
 
 
 

INTERVIEWS

Interviews with John Goodman - Billy Crystal, - Steve Buscemi - John Lasseter and Pete Docter.
By Paul Fischer in Los Angeles, courtesy of Dark Horizons.
 

JOHN GOODMAN

What is your attraction to animation?

John Goodman: Well, I started doing it for my daughter, but in a couple years she'll probably be too old for this stuff. I listened to a lot of radio theatre when I was a kid and I've always been a fan of that stuff.

Did you have a deal with Disney?

John Goodman: No. They started this about halfway through Emperor's New Groove and then started doing Jungle Book 2 about three quarters of the way through this.

If animation is for your daughter, what are roles like Coyote Ugly for?

John Goodman: For the money. Honest to God, that's the only reason I did it.

How much improv is involved?

John Goodman: We would read the scripts and they usually don't let actors read together. They usually read them one at a time with a producer or a director, but this time they brought Billy and I together, I guess to see what would happen. The energy just took off like a rocket. So, Billy, after we'd get done with the script, he'd kind of take over and do whatever he wanted and I'd just try to keep up with him.

Whose idea was it to sing the end song?

John Goodman: Well, Randy Newman was always doing the score and then he wrote the song and I've always been a huge fan of his. I just think he's the best. We did it pretty much after we wrapped everything else.

Will you take that song on the road now?

John Goodman: Yeah, I think we ought to do it at the Oscars next year.

Is computer animation a different process for you than traditional?

John Goodman: No. It's just you and a microphone, so it's the same principle. There's no difference at all.

You were never in the same room?

John Goodman: No, we were. They did bring us together.

Do you get anything for the dolls?

John Goodman: I have nothing to do with it. I don't think I signed any merchandizing deals.

Where did your monsters hide?

John Goodman: Under the bed, not the closet. After a while I got hip and started getting a broom stick, pushing it under there. Yeah, I had all kinds of crap in my closet. There's no way one could've survived in there with my sneakers alone.

Where did the comedian come from in you?

John Goodman: Desperation. I don't know, I've always looked at the world kind of weird.

How?

John Goodman: I just always liked to laugh.

Was there one particular monster that was worse than the others?

John Goodman: Frankenstein. Scared the hell out of me. They used to have a show called This is your Life. One night Boris Karloff was on and I made the mistake of watching it. So, that night, I knew he was coming for me and I got up. I don't know why, but I could actually see him walk down the hall and I ran into my mom's room. "What are you doing in here? Oh, no he's not. Go back to bed."

Did the broomstick help against him?

John Goodman: Well, once you went under the bed, through the closet, hit the bed again, and then you were good to go. And I invented bullet proof sheets so they couldn't kill me.

Have you kept in touch with Roseanne?

John Goodman: Rose called about six months ago, just to check up, see what I was doing. But no, I haven't talked to her for a while. I hope she's doing all right. She looks great.

Have you gone on her talk show?

John Goodman: Yeah. It was weird. The last time, she was determined to sing the blues so I wound up playing harmonica behind her. She started improvising lyrics and it went on for about a half hour.

Did you see what Sullivan looked like?

John Goodman: Oh, yeah. From jump street, they had the illustrations and computer stuff. It's a long process, so it would be maybe two months later I'd come back and they'd have more stuff done and show me how they incorporated - they videotape you when you're reading so they incorporate some of your gestures and your facial expressions.

Are you Baloo in Jungle Book 2?

John Goodman: Yeah.

Was that fun?

John Goodman: Yeah. We did a couple pretty good songs. It's just everybody remembers Phil Harris from it. I try not to imitate him but go along those lines, so it is kind of a challenge.

Any of the same songs?

John Goodman: Well, there's a small repetition of "The Bear Necessities".

Do you like singing?

John Goodman: Yeah. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at it anymore, not that I ever really burnt the house down, but I just smoked too many cigarettes. My voice isn't what it should be.

Do your kids have monsters they hide from?

John Goodman: My daughter, I have an 11 year old daughter and we had just gotten her out of my bedroom when the big earthquake hit. So, that was a big monster there. She was afraid of that for a while.

How important is it for the kids to have this movie now?

John Goodman: It's tough for me to comment on something like that because anything I say is going to sound self-serving. I think in times of crisis, entertainment's always been important.

This one has a positive message?

John Goodman: About fear. I feel a little weird talking about it now.
 
 

BILLY CRYSTAL

What made you want to do a kids' movie?

Billy Crystal: I didn't think of this as a kids' movie when I did it. I thought it was great. The concept of it was fantastic. I knew the audience that would come to see this would be adults and kids and the older, wrinkled kids will love this movie too.

Did you do a lot of improv in the recording studio that they couldn't use?

Billy Crystal: Yeah but I thought they should have pushed a little bit more. I thought, in tone, it could have been a little edgier but when you see it you go, 'this is joyful and great.'

You and John (Goodman) were working together. That's very rare in a voice session.

Billy Crystal: I kept pushing for it. I did the first two sessions alone and I didn't like it. It was lonely and it was frustrating. And, you know Pete (Docter, the director) would say, could you give me one that's. doing the same thing but now ask it as a question. And I would go 'Why?' like 'I'm not doin' this'. Now should I say 'Should I do this? well, in case I change the scene. I said 'Why don't you get John in here? We'll do it together and we can do everything you want but we'll do it together. Then it'll be natural. Then the editor won't be the one who has to put it all together so it sounds real. It'll just be real. Then we did it and it was great.

Were you uncontrollable when you were working together? Would you go off on all sorts of tangents?

Billy Crystal: Good ones. As a director and an actor, I encourage improvisation but in character and in the moment of what it is. My guy I thought was free enough and wild enough to just do anything. And it's up to them to pick the ones they want and use it. I kept saying to Pete, 'No, go. It's a little darker but at least have it. They why was everybody screaming and laughing in the control booth if you're not gonna use it? You want me here, I'm gonna give ya'. It's a smorgasbord. Take the ones that are good'.

Did you fight for your character to have more than one eye?

Billy Crystal: No. I wanted him to have balls. We found out that he did in that one scene. Evidently something hurt. They don't give you a thumb and they don't give you balls. I don't know which one I'd rather have because if you have balls and no thumb you can't hold onto 'um anyway.

What about your own monsters when you were a kid and were did they hide?

Billy Crystal: Relatives and they hid in Brooklyn. I didn't have a specific monster guy. I had generalized anxiety which is worse. I had fears of the dark, you know, I didn't like being in the dark, I didn't like seeing sounds bothered me. I had really good hearing and when you're scared it gets heightened so you hear scratching noises or something. We'd had some burglaries in the area, always someone breaking in. That was the thing. If you're home alone who's gonna take care of you. Who's gonna fend off the whatever it was. Just the unknown. It was a tiny little house. There wasn't room for much. My room was in the back and I didn't like the dark so I would say 'Keep the light on'. I stopped doing that around two or three years ago. I keep the door open a little bit.

Was this is Brooklyn?

Billy Crystal: No. Long Island.

Was there a particular movie monster that may have scared you?

Billy Crystal: There were some pretty scary movies back then which now seem not as scary to some people But Psycho, as a kid, was just terrifying. Bambi, to a kid, was scary.

Was there an animated film you were attached to?

Billy Crystal: Yeah, Pinocchio. It's a great story, the little boy. You could relate to the kid. Jiminy Cricket was a phenomenal character. The epic animation, the whale, Cleo, all the other stuff that Disney was able to put in movies, amazing ideas. It's still great. People are excited that Snow White came out on DVD.

Someone calls you to do an animated movie. What do you do?

Billy Crystal: If it's John Lasseter who calls me, I go where do I sign and when do I start? I loved this idea. They brought a piece, about 35, 40 seconds of him animated with my voice lines from My Giant I realized. 'The size of the hero is determined by the size of the villain. Without Goliath, David is just some kid throwing rocks'. It was this over and over again with this guy talkin' and movin' his hands. Stuff like that and they told me the concept and brought some storyboards and paintings and Pete explained the movie and that was it. I just thought it was epic. And when I sat and saw the movie for the first time the other night, getting back to what you said before, the first thing that hit me hard in a great way was seeing Walt Disney Presents. It hit me hard and I went (takes in a breath) and my wife went 'What's the matter?' and I went 'This is big'. You have to eliminate Walt Disney company like we know it today. What it started out to be was what influenced me as a kid. My mother was the voice of Minnie Mouse for a little while in the Macy's Day parades in New York. She would do the recordings of Minnie's voice in the floats of Minnie coming down 5th Avenue with this big four story Minnie Mouse and my mother was Minnie's voice. So I heard that but the movies, the Mouse Club. I remember, as a kid watching on our black and while set this big (indicates tiny) Walt with a hard hat ploughing Disneyland and putting up this entertainment land with its future highway. It looks like this guy is everybody's uncle. To be part of the legacy of Snow White and Pinocchio and Old Yeller and Davy Crockett and the Mouse Club and Annette and now the Pixar movies which he would be thrilled about. When I saw 'Walt Disney' at the head of this movie, I got all excited to be part of that legacy.

Weren't you supposed to be in Toy Story?

Billy Crystal: Yeah. It just didn't work out at the time. And then when John came with this one. I've seen the tests of me as Buzz Lightyear. They used lines from Harry Met Sally which was hysterical. First you see Buzz, then you see the lines were from the wagon wheel coffee table scene. 'Someday, we're gonna go 15 rounds over who's gonna own this coffee table. This stupid, wagonwheel coffee table' and it's Buzz and then he walks away and the shot widened out and he was underneath the coffee table and you hear Bruno Kirby say, 'I thought you liked it' and little Buzz screams 'I was being nice'. That was the test when they were sampling voices. I never knew this. They had taken lines and animated this little section which I have. It's hilarious.

Now that's a good DVD addition.

Billy Crystal: Yeah but I've got to say though, I wasn't right for it. Tim was fantastic in that character. He was appropriately vacant , really and the quality of his voice was so full of shit like those movie star guys are, those space guys. And he was perfect. This (pointing at stuffed toy of his character) is my guy.

Given current event with kids being inundated both at home and at school, what does it mean to have this kind of film for kids to see at this point?

Billy Crystal:  At ANY time this movie is a great movie. You know, now when it deals with fear and laughter and overcoming terror and all that stuff that's obviously an added thing for them. But, this is a great enjoyment for everybody. What I love about the movie, at any time, is that families can go see it together and it should provoke thought and discussion about fear and about kids, you know sometimes when they're afraid of something, they won't tell their parents because they think something's wrong with them. 'I saw a monster and monsters aren't real'. Sometimes they'll run into the room and say 'I saw a monster' but, if they talk about it, maybe they won't have so many.

Did your kids do that?

Billy Crystal: I still do it.

Did you see Shrek? I assume that and Monsters Inc. are in the running for the Oscar?

Billy Crystal: I think this is a worthy movie of any kind to me. I think Shrek was terrific. They're just very different. The level of difficulty in this movie is extraordinary because of the story it has to tell and the levels of maturity to it. Shrek is a fantastic fable, really funny and it's great too. They're just different.
 
 

STEVE BUSCEMI

How would you describe the experience of doing animation?

Steve Buscemi: It's interesting, and requires a lot of faith in your directors, which I did, and I really trusted him with what THEY were doing, and the film that they wanted to make, and it was a lot of fun.

How did the experience of making Monsters compare to the experience of doing Final Fantasy?

Steve Buscemi: The character of Randall was a little bit more over the top, while the character in Final Fantasy well, he was a little bit of an excitable character, but one was human and the other was a monster, so I guess playing the monster meant you had a bit more freedom to go over-the-top.

Were there any different TECHNICAL challenges in both cases?

Steve Buscemi: Not for me. For me, it was just a voice. The process is really the same.

Did they look at you or your mannerisms before completely formulating the character?

Steve Buscemi: When you are recording the voice, even before you are doing it to picture, they videotape you doing it to see the expressions on your face, and I think they DO try and incorporate some of that.

How surprised are you by the final creation of this character? Do you play any kind of role in overseeing the development of the character while the film is in production?

Steve Buscemi: They pretty well showed me what the character was going to look like from the very beginning. I liked the character and thought he looked great. I liked the big eyes and the fact that he was this lizard-like monster.

Did the scope of the character or anything about him change as you went through the process of revoicing him?

Steve Buscemi: I just remember his name changed, but I can't remember what his original name was. I don't remember there being too many changes with the character. I can tell you that this is a process of over 2 years so you kind of do it, then you do the first session, then you forget about it then you come back and sometimes it was hard to remember where I was in the story or how it was progressing. So Pete really had to keep me informed about what was going on, so it was a very abstract way of acting, but I enjoyed it.

How long did you record?

Steve Buscemi: Over a period of 2 years.

Where did your monsters hide?

Steve Buscemi: DEFINITELY under the bed. When I was that young, I shared the bed with my two brothers and we definitely talked about the monsters being under the bed. You'd be afraid to let your arm drop down and hang off; that was way too scary.

Where was this?

Steve Buscemi: In Brooklyn. Also, I remember being afraid of the headlights that came in through the window late at night and just the way the lights would travel across the bed and up the walls and ceiling. It was explained to me it was just a car, but for some reason that was just eerie.

What were some of YOUR favourite animated films growing up?

Steve Buscemi: Pinocchio was a lot of fun, because I liked the songs in it. It was also scary as well having jokes in it that my parents appreciated. I just LOVED that character and the song 'An Actor's Life for Me'.

Are you excited about your children seeing Monsters Inc?

Steve Buscemi: I have one son and we saw a screening of it, he brought a friend and they were very excited about seeing it before it was released. They really loved it. It's nice to be able to do something that my son can actually see, that most of the stuff I do he's gonna have to wait till he's 17.

Does doing an animated movie like Monsters, bring out the child in you?

Steve Buscemi: Yeah. I mean acting in general is very childlike because you're pretending to be somebody else, so it doesn't matter what the situation is, or how serious the film is, I think acting IS very childlike, and this is just pure fun, and it probably DOES bring out the child in you a little bit more.

Is it more liberating doing an animated film?

Steve Buscemi: Yeah, and also knowing that it's for kids gives you that extra little boost of energy or excitement in wanting to do a good job and not wanting to let the kids down. I remember when I was a kid and watching these films, you just wanted to totally believe it. So even though it's a lot of fun, it's an acting job that I take very seriously because I want the character to be as real as possible, even though it's a fantasy film and you're playing a monster.

In your opinion, what is the central theme or message that you want people to get out of this film?

Steve Buscemi: I'm terrible when it comes to figuring out what a message is, but I guess it would be to face and overcome your fears.
 
 

JOHN LASSETER & PETE DOCTER

John, this is the first of these films you haven't directed, yes?

John Lasseter: The thing is, is if you think about these movies, they take really about four years to make.

Pete Docter: It's very exhausting.

John Lasseter: Toy Story took four years. We overlapped A Bug's Life by a year, so I jumped onto that and that took a total of four years, but it was overlapped by a year, and then Toy Story 2 was overlapped by two years of that and we started realizing that the goal of the company, Pixar, is to be able to come out with a movie every 12 to 18 months depending on when we want to release the movie, Christmas or summer. So we decided I can't possibly direct all of these movies with them being overlapped that much, so we decided we were going to start getting directors lined up to do their own movies and Pete was sort of the first one. We worked together on Toy Story, came up with a story, co-wrote it together. Pete was the supervising animator on it, where I was the director, so when I went on to A Bug's Life, I had Pete sort of skip A Bug's Life and start thinking about what the next movie was going to be. Then there was this little thing called Toy Story 2 that happened in between there. I don't know if you've even heard of it! In fact the next movie that Pixar is going to be doing is going to be directed by Andrew Stanton; Finding Nemo. That's going to be out 18 months from now as a summer picture for 2003. I'll always be directing my own films, but I wear two hats. I'm executive vice president of creative. I oversee everything creative at the studio on one hand and then I also direct my own films.

Are you surprised at how the technology has changed since Toy Story?

John Lasseter: Excited is more the word, because we're a part of that evolution.

Pete Docter: Really what's happened is that the computer has gotten faster, more powerful and really just enabled us to do more with them. The advances are really more due to the smart people that we have in house, they're able to use this great computing power and come up with things that we would have never been able to do. Five years ago we probably couldn't have done Sullivan's hair in Monsters.

What's the process of making these films?

Pete Docter: The process is more or less this: The story is all important, so we spend two or three years, before we do anything on computers, just drawing and writing. Just coming up with the characters. Once we decide to go ahead and put it into production, we build the characters in the computer, if you think of it as a marionette or a puppet, so it exists three dimensionally in the computer, so from there forward there's no real drawings, it's all within the computer and the puppet, we're able to move it by using various controls, at the elbow is a fairly straight forward, there's just the one control there. Same with the wrist, although generally we'll have forward, back, left, right and twist so three different controls to move, so that way you could do any number of movements like this. And then all the way down. Woody had something like 300 controls, Sullivan I think 500.

What software are you using?

John Lasseter: We have created it. We're fifteen years old this year and even before that we were the Lucasfilm computer division before it became a separate company. So we've been pioneering this medium from the beginning. In fact, our rendering system that we've written, called Renderman, won an Academy Award this year because it's become the standard of the industry. In the last ten years, there have been 26 films nominated for Best Special Effects, 24 of those 26 have used Renderman. Our technology has really become standard.

Pete Docter: Really what happens with the technology is that we want to do this stuff, again, it's all driven by the story, and we don't have any real way of doing it, so we write some new software that enables us to do what we need to do tell the story.

Are you software people or creative people?

John Lasseter: It's not that simple. Both of us are trained in animation and art, on that side of it, and the storytelling side, and we work very closely with people who have been trained in computer science. Pixar is the best, best blending of art and technology, yet the line between that is very, very fuzzy. We actually have ongoing education at Pixar University, P.U., and we have classes where we have sculpture, acting, drawing, improv, computer classes. That's why it's amazing to see the artwork being done by the computer science people who have gone through computer science school and start seeing these clay sculptures by them and vice versa. Conversely we're real, real geeks. We are so into the technology. We don't know how to program, but what's important in to be a director in this, is to understand kind of how it works. You don't need to do it, but you need to understand it.

Do you want to take this animation to the photo-realistic level like Final Fantasy?

John Lasseter: It's interesting. Ever since I worked with computer animation, there have been all sorts of people that have always desired and thought that is the goal. For me, the way that we work, is that we use sort of realistic imagery only as something to shoot for. We say that reality is just a convenient measure of complexity. Because if you can create a tool that can produce something that looks almost real then we like to take a step back and produce something the audience knows does not exist, that it's a cartoon, it's caricatured, it's fantasy, it's something, but then use these tools to make that look so believable into the world that we're creating. We want our films, for the audience to look at it, and say, 'I know this isn't real, but it looks so real'. Like Sully, he's walking around, you know he's not real, but look at that fur, bouncing and stuff, and that scene in the snow, I'm still amazed by that, I think that's an incredible thing, with the wind blowing and it's sticking on there and stuff, that's just on a whole other level, but you know that's not real. That's what I think is part of the entertainment value and what we've recognized.

Pete Docter: With the kids, with the humans, and this was the case on Toy Story 2 as well, we always want to make sure that we're doing cartoons. We may be using computers but we're doing caricatured versions of reality. So we're not trying to mimic a real little two-and-a-half-year-old, we're doing a cartoon version of one.

Why no outtakes at the end of the film?

John Lasseter: You are just lucky to have a movie to watch. We were really, really, really under the gun to finish this one.

Can you talk about that, about the hurdles in hitting your deadline?

John Lasseter: The big hurdles, frankly, is the story.

Pete Docter: The tough thing about the story is you never know when the idea is going to come, or if it's going to come. You're working on something and it's just not working, and you keep plugging away at it, and keep plugging away at it and it's usually until the eleventh hour when you're like, 'Hey, what about this?'

John Lasseter: We value the importance of story over absolutely everything else. That kind of drives the producers and the production side a little nuts, because if we get a great idea, even at the eleventh hour, that we think, 'Oh this is going to make it that much better' we will do it and we'll figure out a way to do it.

Did that happen on this?

John Lasseter: Yeah, we don't do many of them, but we really value using previews with regular audiences. Not really what they say afterwards, but audiences are completely honest while they're watching a film. Afterwards is a different story. So we watch the audience watching the movie and we can see whether we've got them or not or whether they're restless or they're there or they're laughing and all those things and we evolved a few things in this. The preview was in spring time, I forget exactly when it was, and we came out of it with a lot of revelations. Then we tweaked it and changed it and we were supposed to be done with animation in June and so we were quickly turning things around. So outtakes. . .

Can you be specific about the things that you tweaked?

John Lasseter: One of the things that we wanted to do, to have at the beginning, is we wanted to take the audience and kids into what they're familiar with about monsters coming out of the closet and scaring. So we were very conscious of like, where are we going to cross the line where something is going to be too scary. In the beginning we milked the tension and it was a little scary and so what we did was after the first preview... you know how it's like really scary, scary, scary, scary and then that monster gets more scared of the kid and steps on the soccer ball and lands on the jacks and all that, so we amped up the humour right after that, that much more to make it funny. And it really works, because kids are starting to watch it, and climb up in their parents lap and all that, and then all of a sudden, when he starts becoming a goofball, they're like laughing and in hysterics and all that. It really worked.

The little bird short that precedes Monsters, is that going to be in theatres?

John Lasseter: Yes, and we're proud to say that. For The Birds.

Pete Docter: It was directed by Ralph Eccleston who was the production designer on Toy Story.

Did you make that for the Academy Award consideration?

John Lasseter: That's not why we do it. The short films, we really love short films. That's where Pete and I got our start. We love them as an art form and they don't get enough play in the world. We produce them for two reasons; one, it is a great way for us to try out new technology, because sometimes when you're trying something, some new piece of software technology, it's very labour intensive to use. You can't have that on a feature film, but you can have it on a short, so we try out new things. For instance, in Gerry's Game, the chess player, it was the first time we had clothing that was dynamically animated. Meaning, the computer was animating the clothing based on the underlying structure of the body, it's the way clothing works on us. So you look at Boo, running around, her clothes, it's like that. It was kind of derived from that. In For The Birds, two computer objects don't know where the other one is, so if they move, they move right through each other. And so in this case, one of the things we worked on is when they get smashed together, they sort of know where each other is.

What about including more Toy Story jokes in Monsters?

Pete Docter: We talked about that. I think if you go too far, you pop people out of the film and you want to keep them believing in this world.

Lasseter: But we absolutely love putting those kinds of funny self referencing jokes in there.

What about the role in Apple in all of this?

John Lasseter: Steve Jobs is our CEO and he's CEO of Apple, so there's a connection there, but that's just a person. The companies actually have no real affiliation, except that we use Apple computers throughout the company for email and word process, you know, and Apples are getting faster and faster and their new OS10 is Unix based which is all of our software is Unix based, but as yet we haven't transferred any of our software that creates the movie over to Apples.

How did you make Boo such a fully realized character with only a three word vocabulary?

Pete Docter: With Boo, we knew early on that we wanted this really appealing little kid, so as part of the process, we make a temporary version of reels. We do the voices ourselves, we do temporary music and stuff, just to see whether the whole thing is working or not. What we did was, we initially started doing the voices ourselves for Boo, and it just popped you out of the film to have an adult voice. So, one of the story guys, Rob Gibbs, had a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter and we brought her in and she initially we were going to record her just doing the lines. I'd say, 'Okay, now pretend you're really scared.' And she would just go and run away and play and it was just really hard to get her to stand there. So we ended up picking up the mic and following her and we just played. We had toys, we had puppets and we just fooled around. We got her to say kitty and a couple of other things, but the rest of all the vocalizations were just real noises that she made.

John Lasseter: When she was young, when she first started, her language, you couldn't really tell. Only her parents knew what she was saying. But as she got older, she started speaking English to the point where the editors would go back and turn it back into nonsense.
 
 
 
 
 
 

THE MAKING OF M.I.

By Barbara Robertson, Senior Editor, West Coast, for Computer Graphics World - October, 2001
 

If you didn't suspect, when you were a child, that a monster might be in your closet, you probably knew someone who did. But did you ever ask why a monster would be there? When Pete Docter asked the question, his answers put him on a path that led to a feature film. Monsters, Inc. marks the directorial debut for Docter, who was supervising animator and one of four screenwriters for the enormously successful Toy Story, Pixar's first full-length film.

With Toy Story, Pixar crafted a new feature film genre, and with each film since-A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2-the studio has pushed the art and technology of computer animation further. This film is no exception. The studio gave three of the country's leading experts in dynamic simulation, all of whom work for Pixar, two of the hardest problems in computer graphics: simulating hair and cloth. The Monsters, Inc. production team also devised innovative techniques for creating more visual complexity than in previous films, and mastered some tricky rendering problems. All these advances in technology and technique were needed to serve the story. The main characters required hair and cloth simulations; the other techniques helped make the monsters' world believable.

 That world began to take shape as Docter and his colleagues at Pixar thought about why those monsters are in the closet.

"We figured out that the monsters scare kids because that's their job. That's what they're paid to do," Docter says. Why? The monsters' world is powered by screams. "What the monsters do is go into a kid's room, harvest the scream, and then refine it into high- or low-octave scream for commercial- or industrial-grade use," explains Docter.

The two stars of the film, James P. Sullivan (voiced by John Goodman) and Mike Wazow ski (Billy Crystal) work for one of the big three energy companies, Monsters Incorporated. "Sully" is the company's best scarer; Mike is his assistant, best friend, and roommate.

 "The way it works is that there's a big vault that houses millions and millions of kids' closet doors that can be anywhere in the world-Paris, Rome, Detroit," says Docter "It's all computerized. You get the kid's card and swipe it through a console like you're paying for groceries. The computer accesses the door, and it's brought up on what looks like a dry-cleaner track. The door mechanism grabs it, the computer activates it, and the monster goes in and scares the kid."

There's a big problem, though. "Times are tough for the energy companies," says Docter. "These days, kids are not as easily scared because of video games and the media, so there's an energy crisis."

One day a human child follows Sully into the monster world, where children are forbidden: The monsters believe kids are dangerous because they contain so much pure energy. And indeed, hiding the cute bundle of pure energy is difficult. "When she gets loud, light bulbs pop, and all kinds of things go haywire," says Darla Anderson, producer. But with Mike's help, Sully tries to send the little girl, whom he's named Boo, safely home before she's discovered. In so doing, he crosses paths with a jealous co-worker and stumbles upon a dastardly plot to boost energy production. And the plot thickens.

All told, the crew created 50 monsters plus variations and 22 different location sets, including kids' bedrooms, Harry Hausen's Sushi restaurant, the snowy home of the Yeti, the scream extraction factory, and the city of Monstropolis itself, where buildings are decorated with eyeballs and claws rather than flowers and vines. One of the most complex sets is the door vault inside the factory, which has 5.7 million unique closet doors, of which around 500,000 are on a mile-long "highway."

"It's probably the most complicated in terms of renderability," says Anderson, who notes that individual frames in some establishing shots, which have numerous moving doors and use atmospheric effects to emphasize the door vault's cavernous space, could take as long as 80 hours to render. That's a measure of the complexity of this film given today's processors-and Pixar has a ton of them: The studio's renderfarm now contains 3500 Sun Microsystems processors.

To measure and compare the compute power needed for its films over the years, Pixar uses so-called "RenderMarks." (To calculate how many RenderMarks a particular machine has, Pixar runs a predefined set of images through RenderMan and measures how long it takes to render frames. A 1000 RenderMark CPU computes the same frame twice as fast as a 500 RenderMark CPU.) The first Toy Story (1995) used 50,000 RenderMarks for rendering; A Bug's Life (1998) needed 700,000 RenderMarks; and Toy Story 2 (1999) took 1.1 million. Monsters, Inc. re quired 2.5 million Render Marks, more than the first three films combined.

The big jump for Monsters, Inc. is due in part to Sully's hair and Boo's T-shirt. Some 2,320,413 hairs cover Sully's purple-spotted, eight-foot-tall body, all dynamically simulated using new technology developed for this film. Also simulated is Boo's oversize T-shirt, which hangs loosely on her 2-1/2 foot tall body. The two stars appear in hundreds of shots.

The launching point for the new technology was a cloth simulation system created by senior scientist Michael Kass for Pixar's Oscar-winning short film Geri's Game (1997). Senior scientists Andy Witkin and David Baraff began working on the code base for the new simulator in 1998.

This simulator, named Fizt, is the result of a long-time collaboration among the three scientists: Kass and Wit kin began publishing papers together on physically based modeling 15 years ago. Witkin and Baraff began working on cloth simulation at Carnegie Mellon University in 1992 and while there developed Maya Cloth for Ali as|Wavefront. "There were things [in the Geri's Game and Maya Cloth systems] that were the best we could do at the time, but frankly, they weren't good enough for what we needed to do for Monsters," says Baraff.

"We needed a solution that was robust enough to work in a production environment for a film in which fur and clothing appear in many of the shots," says Witkin. "Things had to work with little human intervention, and the simulation couldn't grind our pipeline to a halt."

Thus, Witkin and Baraff began developing a system that could model a variety of dynamic effects, with emphasis on hair and cloth. "Hair and cloth have a common foundation," says Witkin, explaining, for example, that both hair and woven threads are easy to bend and resist stretching. In addition, both can be broken into small pieces-hair can be represented as a curve that can be broken into a chain of particles; a thin sheet of cloth can be broken into particles or triangles. "You can find common ground by saying that ultimately everything in the simulator is going to be approximated as a bunch of particles. Then you can model the dynamics of the particles and the forces that interact and couple them."

"What's different is that the interaction forces are more complicated with clothing because you have things happening in two directions and because the problems due to collision and contact are more complicated," Witkin says.

 The two biggest issues, according to Baraff, were cloth-to-cloth and cloth-to-solid collisions. In cloth-to-cloth collisions, the cloth wrinkles and folds on itself. "Picture what happens when you crumple a piece of cloth into a ball," says Witkin. "[The simulated cloth] has to keep from passing through itself." Cloth-to-solid collisions happen when cloth is draped on the human body. In this case, the challenging problems happen when cloth is draped on a character's body and gets sandwiched between two body parts. This typically happens in armpits and elbows and when animators place a character's arm next to its side. "The cloth goes inside the body and even intersects itself yet somehow you expect that when you move the arm, the cloth will magically settle back into a nice clean state," says Baraff. The problem is similar for Sully's fur. When his arms are tightly at his side, for example, his arm hair bunches and intersects with his body hair.

"If you don't know how to stay out of that situation or get out of it once you get into it, you can wind up with the cloth getting tangled in a way that's physically unrealistic and you can't find your way out. It grinds the simulator to a halt. Someone has to come in, iron out the wrinkles [or comb the hair] and start over. Even if that happens only from time to time, it can be a serious problem for the flow of production," says Witkin. Worse, because animators move only the body parts visible to the camera, body parts hidden from view often end up in strange and physically impossible positions-an animator might let an arm poke through a leg, for example.

"It's an exceedingly difficult problem, but we thought we knew how to solve it coming in," says Baraff. Their idea was to have the animators avoid creating these problems. "The word we got back rather quickly was, 'No. The animators will continue to do what they have always done. You will find a way to make the simulator work correctly in the presence of that,'" he says.

They solved the problem by creating a physically based simulator that was tolerant of physically unrealistic behavior. The simulator knows how to keep tangles and interpenetrations from happening for the most part, but if they should happen, it can repair the cloth (or hair) and put it back into the expected shape. Thus, because interpenetrations can happen for a short time in a relatively small place, animators usually did not have to change the way they worked. Simulation and effects sequence supervisor Mark Henne, who helped turn the simulation technology into a viable tool for cloth dynamics, says, "We had to send the cloth simulation back to animators because of intersections in only about 10 percent of the cases."

Thus, although simulation added a step to the pipeline, the process didn't create a bottleneck. In addition, the scientists accelerated the simulation by using such techniques as multithreading. They cite 17 minutes per animation second (24 frames) of output for cloth simulation, and 10 minutes per second for Sully's hair. Pixar won't reveal details about the solution other than to say it involves "analyzing the geometry of the way the cloth is intersecting itself." The studio has filed for patents on the technology, and the scientists expect to publish technical papers describing the process next year.

Sure Shots
As did Henne for cloth simulation, simulation and effects sequence supervisors Michael Fong and Steven May brought hair simulation into the production process. They put Sully through obstacle courses to test the simulator, created tools, methods, and shaders for growing, grooming, and rendering the hair, and even created "wind widgets" for specific situations. For example, the underlying engine for growing hair is a RenderMan DSO (dynamically shared object) written by May that distributes hair on the character, reads data from the simulator, and then runs a shader called a "builder" for every hair. "The builder has information about each hair-its length, taper, color, and other characteristics that make it unique." And Fong wrote an interactive 3D grooming tool for the 28,000 "key hairs" that are procedurally distributed on all the vertices on Sully's model.

Because simulation added another process to the production pipeline, Pixar created a new "shots" department under the direction of Galyn Susman, simulation and effects supervisor. Susman explains, "We're the catch-all, can-do-it department. Once a shot leaves layout and goes to animation, we assign a shot TD [technical director] to it. The shot TDs are responsible for simulation, effects, and rendering passes. They also help lighting supervisors and optimize rendering." Shot TDs, for example, built collision objects used by the simulator and created atmospheric effects. They put animated scenes onto video monitors for shots within shots and created 3D matte paintings that provide a quick glimpse of what's behind a closet door. And they created other types of effects.

"Some things don't fall easily into typical categories, but a lot of what we do is make the characters feel like they are stitched into their environment," Susman says. "We put footprints in the snow, or make a soft cushion respond to a character's touch."

While most people in production use Pixar's proprietary software, Susman's group uses "anything and everything we can get," she says, listing, in addition to Pixar's internal tools, Nothing Real's Shake, Ado be Systems' After Effects, and Inter active Effects' Amazon Paint. "And we use Maya a ton. We do all our particle work in Maya." Alias|Wavefront's Maya is also used to create models at Pixar.

In addition, the shots department is responsible for final rendering. Tom Porter, supervising technical director, explains, "We used to have a rendering group at the tail end of the process and by the time the shots got there they could be huge. Now, the shot TD is responsible for the shot as it moves through the pipeline."

One rendering problem in particular was posed by Sully's hair. "We got tremendous help from the RenderMan team," says Rick Sayre, shading supervisor. "They completely rewrote the way hair is rendered and made it a lot faster and more efficient." For example, a team led by Render Man engineer Craig Kolb devised new algorithms to reduce the number of micropolygons generated for each hair and to use parallel processing for the hair shading. Another "hair" challenge involved lighting and shading. "The way hair responds to light is intimately tied with shadows. If hair doesn't have self-shadows on it, it doesn't look right," Sayre explains. "And the way we work is to think of shadows as a conscious choice. They don't just happen." But Render Man's shadow maps, which are basically on or off-something is in shadow or it's not-didn't produce the effect they wanted. The shading team also discovered that classical hair illumination models, even if mathematically sound, don't look right. Instead, they used an algorithm called Deep Shadows developed by Tom Lokovic, based on research published in the paper, "Deep Shadow Maps" by Lokovic and Eric Veach, Pixar RenderMan engineers, in the Siggraph 2000 Proceedings. With Deep Shadows, they were able to self-shadow the hair using colored shadows with transparency, and were able to have motion blurred objects cast shadows. "One of the best uses for Deep Shadows is for hair," says Dan McCoy, shading technical director.

Screamy Weather
The shadowing technique was also used for the fog, steam, and atmospheric effects that occur in Monstropolis, because screams look a bit like steam. To help shot TDs and lighting supervisors work easily with these effects, the shading team created little programs, DSOs, which could be linked to the renderer. "You could have a foggy sphere, a foggy box, a volume of fog in the room, or little puffy fog stickers," says Sayre. "For example, light beams shining through particulate matter in fog helped give the door vault greater depth.You can treat fog as a first-class object, put lights on fog or not, and use different intensities in the shadows for fogs."

Another consequence of being powered by steam is that there are steam-carrying pipes everywhere. To create this network, the modeling department made a construction kit of pipes and connectors that the set-dressing department could put together. Tony Apodaca, who worked on production shading for Monsters, Inc., created an intelligent shader that worked with the construction kit. "The shader would know where it was in space, so it made the pipe a little corroded at junctions, and scratched the pipe based on how big it was," says Sayre.

This is the first time the shading team worked as closely with set dressing as with lighting, where final touches are added to a model's surface. For this film, the shading department helped make lighting easier and also gave lights a new purpose."The way we light is very close to painting," says Jean-Claude Kalache, supervising lighting lead. "We look at a corner and think we need a highlight or small shadow and then step back and look at our work." Thus, an average shot in Monsters, Inc. had 200 lights.

To help make the hard problem of lighting Sully's hair easier, the shading department gave the lighting team tools that allowed them to accurately light the furry monster by lighting only his skin, which allowed the process to go much faster than if his hair had to be visible. And, with clever "coco" (color correction) lights developed in the shading department, the lighting team could "paint" monster models with colored lights to create the visually complex illusion of hundreds of unique monsters in the background.

All Dressed Up
The artists in the set-dressing department gave the film much of its most obvious visual complexity, however. "Essentially, when a set comes to us from the modeling department, it's just walls and windows," says Sophie Vincelette, supervising set dresser. To help set dressers turn bare rooms into complex stage sets, the modeling department provided an electronic catalog with hundreds of 3D props-everything they could imagine would be needed in a real world-paper, pencil, computer, desk, chair, and so forth for factory offices; a manhole cover, litter, lights, and other accoutrements for streets; a poster, book, magazine, and toys for kids' rooms, and so forth. The shading department then created textures and shaders and gave set dressers controls they could use to vary the look of models. "They could order Burp cola, number seven, slightly scratched, from the catalog," says Sayre.

The set dressers often took their cues from the story. Take Mike's desk, for example. "They're always saying to Mike in the movie, 'Don't forget to file your paperwork,' so we wanted to make it look like he doesn't file his paperwork," says Vincelette. They piled folders of papers on his desk, and on the floor around the desk if it were late in the day, using the shader variants to bend and fold the paper, and to change colors and texture maps.

The set dressers also helped give the city its late '50s look. "We try to put history in the worlds we create," says John Lasseter, executive producer. "Not only do we do a back story of each character, we do a back story of the buildings." The back story in this case is that Monstropolis's big growth happened in the late '50s, when the baby boomers were still young, naive, and easily scared.

This attention to detail and to creating visual complexity permeates the film. "As a director, you work really hard to make the audience suspend their disbelief," says Lasseter, who directed Pixar's previous features. "You take them into a world where they are just with you. If any visual thing happens that doesn't seem right, boom, you've lost them for a few seconds."

Adds Ed Catmull, Pixar founder and president: "From a technical point of view, I think we're getting closer to the point in our films where you don't notice the technology. If people pay attention to the effects when they watch our films, then we haven't done our job. But, for example, if the hair looks so good that you don't think about it because it feels like a natural part of the character, then we will have succeeded. If movement is too simple, then it stands out. We've become more complex in order not to be noticed."

What will be next, then, for the studio in terms of technology?

"It used to be barely possible to make these films," says Catmull. "Now the difficult challenge is to make it easy."