Monsters University’ was a learning curve
DAN SCANLON ( pictured) started working at Pixar Animation Studios the month Monsters Inc was released in 2001.
“I got in on the wrap party. I couldn’t believe I was watching it with the people who made it.
“And now, I got to make a movie,” he says excitedly about directing his first feature-length animated film, Monsters University.
He calls me from Germany where they’d just screened a premiere, having come from the Annecy Animated Film Festival in France where Monsters University screened as the opening film.
Pixar’s 14th feature-length animated film is a prequel to a highly successful computergenerated film about monsters who work for a power company, collecting the screams of children to power their city.
In addition to creating some memorable characters, the creative team behind Monsters Inc also pioneered new ways of rendering fur and cloth realistically for the film (though its Oscar came for Best Original Song).
While there is a continuity of look and feel between this prequel and its predecessor, the biggest difference is technological in nature – they were able to render, create and animate so many more characters at the same time because of new software.
“The biggest challenge on this film was the scope of it and the number of varied characters. We wanted a diverse college, with monsters with several legs and flying monsters and monsters of various sizes,” said Scanlon.
Several, though not all of the characters, are the younger versions of characters we know
Fourteen films in, Pixar Animation Studios’ strength lies in creating complex characters who still start off in the traditional way on the drawing board. Nowadays, their association with Disney means the characters live on in theme parks, writes
Theresa Smith.
from Monsters Inc, like the Yeti – voiced by Pixar good luck charm John Ratzenberger. Or Randall, who is very different as a college monster from the scary character we got to know as the bad guy in Monsters Inc.
“We love those characters and wanted to include a lot of them, but only chose ones where we could get fun ways of them being part of the story.”
Or where including the character helped to further the story, “like, in the case of Randall, to show how Mike could’ve make a bad choice”.
The new software also meant “a richer look to the lighting, which helped…
“We really wanted the school to feel like a real place. It had to mean the world to Mike and we wanted the audience to feel like it was a real place. We went to universities around the US to soak up the vibe, but we didn’t model it after one particular university.”
His favourite characters from the first film were Mike and Sully because of the relationship between them, which always came across as real to him as the viewer.
His college roommate Brian Fee, who went to the same college as he did in Ohio (Columbus College of Art), had started working as a storyboard artist on Cars before Scanlon started working at Pixar as story artist on the same movie.
While Fee didn’t work on Monsters University, Scanlon and the other artists did spend a lot of time swopping stories about their own college experiences.
“Unfortunately a lot of us went to art school, so that wasn’t exactly the frat experience, but the one thing we connected to was Mike’s story. Showing up so excited and thinking you were going to take on the world and it was going to be easy, but then life turned out to be much harder than you thought.
“That feeling of frustration, and the coming of age, that really was the part that hooked us.”
While the film is meant to be scary in parts – after all, these are the monsters hiding under kids’ beds, scaring them to collect the screams – it’s a fine line the filmmakers are walking between creating dramatic tension and not scaring the audience right out of the film.
“We grew up on these great Disney movies and there were scary moments and we remember the characters because they thrilled us.
“There were lots of times when the monsters are doing the scary, but they’re fun and colourful monsters. Hopefully the kids get that it’s fun.”
Still, the team was also aware that parents had to sit through the movies, so the in-jokes and references crept in.
“The A113 is there, and there is a little glimpse of the next Pixar movie. Watch the toys on the ground,” Scanlon threw in.
“We did our own fun things too, like the date of Mike’s final exam is my mom’s birthday. Everything in an animated film has to be created, so it’s hard for us to be random.”
It’s taken almost five years for this film to get from drawings on a page to finished film, which Scanlon thinks is about how long live action feature films take.
“In animation, you and your team have to create everything. Nothing comes free, everything is a decision – the doorknobs on the wall, the walls themselves… it’s a lot.”