Hi, everyone. Happy New year. I'm Em and welcome to Verbal Diorama, Episode 327, Monsters, Inc. This is the podcast that's all about the history and legacy of movies, you know, and movies you don't. That didn't file her paperwork last night and pretty much never files her paperwork, if I'm being completely honest. Welcome to Verbal Diorama. It is now 2026. Whether you're a brand new listener, whether you're a regular returning listener, thank you for being here. Thank you for choosing to listen to this podcast. I am so happy to have you here in 2026 for the history and legacy of Monsters, Inc. And if you are a regular returning listener, thank you so much for coming back to this podcast, for continuing to listen to and support this podcast in its now seventh year, well, technically eighth year, I guess, of running, but it's going to be seven next Month eighth Year of Verbal Diorama thank you so much for your continued support. It really genuinely means so much. I am back after a bit of a Christmas break, but in all honesty, I really struggle to step away from this podcast. Even when I do take regular breaks, which I've tried to do more in recent years, I really struggle because I genuinely always want to come back and I always want to work and I always want to try and put out episodes and Christmas was brilliant and it was a lot of fun. But it was also I really want to get back to this podcast and I really want to talk about this episode specifically because welcome once again to Animation Season. Now, animation season is something that I've done since 2020. So this is the sixth annual animation season and I am a huge fan of animated movies and it's something that I think that more podcasts should actually talk about. Animated Movies Animation Season is a celebration of animation in all forms. Traditional 2D, hand drawn, stop motion, CGI mix of all the above, I featured some of the greatest animation studios of all time. Of Elbow Diorama. In the past I featured Laika, Aardman, Disney Dreamworks, Pixar Studio Ghibli, Sony Cartoon Saloon, even the studios that no longer exist, like Fox Don Bluth Studios, all have been featured on this podcast multiple times in the past. Animation is not just for children. Animation is not a genre. It is the perfect art form. It is capable of depicting anything and anyone without the limitations of live action cinema. This is why Animation Season remains so important to me and to this podcast. To highlight incredible animated films that you may love or you may have discounted for whatever reason. But in my opinion, you shouldn't because you're missing out on some incredible storytelling. And that's why I love to do this every January and February. And this year I'm off to say there are some absolute doozies in the animation season schedule. Movies that I get aasked. When am I doing an episode for it? Cult favourites, Oscar nominees, Potential Oscar nominees, Oscar winners and movies that I think deserve a little bit more love. And so we come to the first episode of Animation Season 2026 and the last couple of years, it's got to become a tradition to start the season with a Pixar movie. Now that's not something that I've done every animation season, but in recent years I have. And I feel like you've kind of got to start how you mean to go on. And where Pixar is concerned, Pixar have made some truly great animated Movies since Toy story debuted in 1995. But one of them most special to me is this movie, Monsters Inc. Which in 2026 is 25 years old. It does not look 25 years old. This movie is incredible. So put that thing back where it came from. Also helped me. Here's the trailer for Monsters, Inc. The city of Monstropolis centres around the city's main power company, Monsters Incorporated. The top scarer at the company is the lovable and confident James P. Sullivan, better known as Sully, and his best friend and scaring assistant, the wisecracking Mike Wazowski. They discover what happens when the real world interacts with theirs in the form of a three year old girl called Boo, who accidentally sneaks into the monster world. And according to everyone, children are toxic to monsters. It's up to Sully and Mike to send Boo back before anybody finds out. But they end up uncovering a sinister conspiracy within the company to kidnap and elicit more scares from children. Let's, as always, run through the cast. We have John Goodman as James P. Sully Sullivan, Billy Crystal as Mike Wazowski, Mary Gibbs as Boo, Steve Buscemi as Randall Boggs, James Coburn as Henry J. Waternoose, Jennifer Tilly as Celia May, Bob Peterson as Roz, and John Ratzenberger as The Yeti Monsters Inc. Has a screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Daniel Gerson, story by Pete Docter, Jill Poulton, Geoff Pidgeon and Ralph Eggleston was directed by Pete Docter and co directed by David Silverman and Lee Unkrich. For as long as children have believed that their toys could come to life when they leave the room, they've also been afraid of the monster in their closet or under their bed. It's hard to remember a time when we didn't have Pixar movies. And to be honest, if you were born after 1995, you don't remember a time Pixar didn't make movies. And look at you if that's the case. I was born a little bit before 1995. Monsters Inc. Was Pixar's fourth movie, which again seems like one of those facts that can't possibly be true. And it was originally conceived even before Toy Story was released. Now I don't need to tell you what a huge shift in the animation industry Toy Story was I already have in episode 50 of this podcast. It would have been easy to write Toy Story off as Pixar's lightning in a bottle, the success of which is something they could never replicate again. And yet the creative leads at Pixar weren't resting on their laurels even during Toy Story's production. I've mentioned in previous episodes about a meeting in 1994 between Andrew Stanton, John Lasseter, Pete Docter and Joe Ranft during production of Toy Story to gather ideas for the next Pixar feature. Conceived during that lunch were early stage talks for A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo and Wall E, some of the cream of the crop that Pixar would ever release, as well as Monsters, Inc. It wasn't called that at the time, but the idea was fixed in the whole Monsters in a Child's Closet. The first three Pixar movies had a story co written and directed by John Lasseter, and taking on the mantle of directing the fourth feature would have been a daunting task for anyone. John Lasseter had proven Toy Story wasn't just a fluke that Pixar could become successful, that this was the little animation studio that could. It's worth noting that Lasseter would end up leaving Pixar in 2018 due to allegations of sexual misconduct, so we're not going to dwell too much on him. Unfortunately, we do have to mention him because he is kind of integral to this story. But in that original 1994 brainstorming session were men who would shape the company and its fortunes, including Andrew Stanton, who would go on to co write and direct Finding Nemo, Wally and Finding Dory. Joe Ranft would co direct Cars before his untimely death in 2005. And then there's Pete Docter. He would go on to direct Up Inside out and Soul, but he was given the task of directing Pixar's fourth feature, what would become Monsters, Inc. He would also direct the English dub of my favourite studio Ghibli movie. How Smoothing Castle. Originally, the concept for Monsters Inc. Was just called Monsters, and the original pitch for the movie was a slightly different idea. It still focused on monsters in your closet. It was about an accountant in his 30s who hated his job and was frightened by monsters who came to life inspired by drawings he made as a child. The intriguing thing to Pete Docter was the idea that as kids we have these unnamed unconscious fears and we create monsters as a way to make them tangible. Dr. And the team began thinking, if monsters represent fears, what then are the monsters themselves afraid of? Now the obvious answer was children, our own fears being afraid of us. The monsters aren't monsters in their world. They're just regular people. They have jobs, they form relationships, they talk about the weather, what they saw on the TV last night. Scaring kids is just their job. Doctor has said in interviews that he genuinely thought Monsters, Inc. Would be a disaster and that it was extremely difficult for him to follow John Lasseter to follow in his footsteps, but also carve his own path at Pixar. He started working on Monsters in 1996, and shortly afterwards, he and his wife Amanda welcomed their son Nicholas into the world. Pete Doctor has routinely involved his ideas of parenting and children into his movies. Inside Out's main inspiration for the character of Riley was Doctor's then preteen daughter. But as the doctors were bringing their infant son home from the hospital, the horror of a tiny human counting on a huge in comparison human to take care of. It started to get him thinking about Monsters. Pete Docter would work all day and he would come home to his son doing new things and hated the fact that he wasn't there for any of his milestones. He would say in an interview with Indiewire. Quote, it was that struggle between the sort of duty of work and then the love of a kid that really kind of became the heart of what Monsters was about, unquote. The idea for the movie wasn't solely doctors, and he's always refused the full credit, saying that he developed the idea with story artist Jeff Pidgeon. And production designer Harley Jessup. And as they developed their ideas, they would take them to John Lasseter, who would advise them on how to make the script stronger. And monsters evolved many times from that original pitch. It went from an accountant in their 30s to a reality show where monsters scare kids for fun, to monsters whose job it was to scare kids. But it would still look different to the finished product. There was no Sully, but a clumsy monster called Johnson. Johnson was actually more like the character that Mike Wazowski would become. Kind of timid and inspired by the real scary monsters at his work. Instead of Randall, there was Ned, and he was the top scarer at the company. Johnson wasn't respected and is threatened with being fired. The character that would become Boo varied in age and gender over time, but in the script developer period is named Mary. And she's older, aged around seven years old. And she ends up scaring Johnson rather than the other way around. She follows him into the monster world, disguises herself as a monster and stays with Johnson and helps him scare other children. When Ned finds out about her, he calls the authorities who arrest Johnson, and she helps him escape by bringing him into the real world. Docter Would cite the 1973 film Paper Moon as inspiration for the idea of an adult character getting stuck with a child for a few years. After 1996, the story continued to evolve, but the issue of empathizing with monsters kept coming up. Through various drafts, Johnson went from being a janitor to a scarab to his final incarnation. He was the star of the company and the best scarab. Mary went from being a seven year old to a three year old because the younger she was, the more she would depend on the older monster character Johnson became. Sully, the character of Ned morphed into Randall Boggs, who became less of a top tier monster and more of a second banana to Sully. Earlier drafts had him dress in nice suits and kiss up to Waternoose. And the mantra for Pixar in these early days was Do I care? Do I care? Do I care? You had to care about these monsters despite them being monsters. And that was always going to be a tough thing to navigate for Tod's story in A Bug's Life. These movies were rooted very much in the real world, whereas Monsters Inc. Would be based on its own monsterverse. And anything could go in that world, which was ripe for all sorts of storytelling. In May 1997, it was longtime Disney animator Joe Grant, who had started working at Disney in 1933 and drew conceptual art for the Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Who was the one to suggest the title? Monsters Inc. A play on the 1960 film Murder Inc. A film about an organized crime group. In the early 1900s, working from Pete Docter's original idea, Andrew Stanton, who had written the three previous Pixar features and served as executive producer on the film, set to work creating a screenplay that would capture the concept's spirit and imagination. Once Stanton had established the foundation for the film through several screenplay drafts, he turned his attention to his next project, Finding Nemo, and Dan Gerson stepped in to write subsequent versions of the screenplay. Gerson joined Pixar in 1999 and collaborated with both Docter And co director David Silverman, who joined in 1998, to focus on strengthening the relationships between characters. At the same time, story supervisor Bob Peterson and his team were helping to visualize the script with drawings, gags, and lots of inventive ideas. Along with co director Lee Unkrich, another future big name for Pixar, each of the three directors bought different strengths. Silver had worked on the story and wrote gags. He helped develop the personalities of the characters and added a great deal to the film's humour. Unkrich oversaw the editing, staging and cinematography, basically doing the same role that he had on Toy Story 2. Throughout first iterations of the screenplay, there was a Sully character and a Boo character, but there was no Mike Wazowski. Mike wouldn't even come into the equation until a story summit in April 1998, a crash exercise to write a quick screenplay where the group at that summit agreed that Sully needed a buddy character. Storyboard artist Ricky Nierva had come up with a background character, a spherical character with one eye and legs, but with no arms. Originally, they just wanted him to have legs and use his legs to do everything. But through the process, they found that a lot of expressions count on the asymmetry of facial expressions. And with this character only having one eye, they struggled to get him to emote without arms and hands. So they ended up giving him arms and hands. He started out orange until John Lasseter said that he looked like an actual orange with arms and legs. When it came to designing Sully, then Disney Feature Animation president Tom Schumacher advised the team to not make him look like a guy in a suit. Godzilla might disagree, and so would the person who'd have to play the character at Disneyland. Probably so. They originally went with tentacles and multiple eyes, but that became aesthetically challenging. Designing a monster with tentacles was one thing, but animating it would be another. The studio even created a tentacle package in case they were going to animate a character with lots of arms or legs. But it would have been impossible for a main character within the production schedule they had planned. Instead of the challenge of animating tentacles, they went with the challenge of animating a two legged character with fur, with the tentacle package used on background characters instead. Then, about a decade into the future, when Pixar were animating the character of Hank in Finding Dory, everyone would cite Monsters Inc. As trailblazing in experiments with tentacles. Many test models were built of both Sully and Mike. When Sully was Johnson, he was a brown short haired monster with horns and the aforementioned green tentacles. They collected all kinds of fur samples from llamas, yaks, sheep, goats and bear to keep him playful. They went with a matted medium length fur to make him look like a big lovable bear. After reviewing versions of Sully that looked like fruit, striped gum colours, a leopard and a giraffe, he would become a blue green monster with purple dots and two legs, no tentacles. Ricky Nierva was the lead character designer for Sully, and when they agreed on the design of the character, they then had to move on to creating that much fur. But before we talk about the fur, they had to cast the movie. And Pete Docter's first choice for Sully was wasn't John Goodman, but actually Bill Murray. Murray auditioned, screen tested and went through the whole process right up until Docter Couldn't even get hold of him. Because Bill Murray is notoriously difficult to get hold of. With Murray not responding to requests to get in touch, they moved on and offered it to John Goodman, who understood the character immediately as the star quarterback of Scaring for Mike. Pete Docter went to Billy Crystal, who'd regretted turning down the role of Buzz Lightyear the Toy Story. And he was delighted to be asked and accepted pretty much on the spot. Because if Pixar come calling for a voice role, you say yes, unless you're Bill Murray. This movie would be very different with Bill Murray as Sully. And this is another buddy pairing, similar to the buddy pairing that they had in Toy Story. And for Toy Story, Tom Hanks and Tim Allen recorded their lines separately, which was the norm for animated movies. But Monsters Inc. John Goodman and Billy Crystal not only recorded their lines together, they would improv together, leading to some off the cuff conversations, such as the locker room chat about Underhand. That was all improvised between the pair. Whereas Woody and Buzz had just met in Toy story. We meet Sully and Mike as longtime best friends. And Goodman and Crystal's rapport really sells it. One of the issues with aging down Boo was casting someone age appropriate. Boo was a challenging character on so many levels because she needed to feel authentic. This wasn't going to be a Rugrats situation where grown adults are playing babies. Rob Gibbs had started working at Pixar as a story artist on Toy Story 2 and was working on Monsters Inc. And they needed a little girl to come in so the artist could sketch an age appropriate child and to use her for scratch dialogue. Dialogue that's recorded before the actor comes in. And Rob had a two year old daughter called Mary. Mary often came into the Pixar offices while her father worked, so she knew everyone and was very comfortable in their presence. Many of the recordings captured of Mary are completely organic, just recordings of of a little girl having fun. Not that it was easy to record a two year old. They don't tend to sit still. Mary's recordings were so good that she was cast as Boo in the early production of Monsters, Inc. In November 2000, Pixar actually packed up and moved over 500 employees from Point Richmond to a much bigger campus in Emeryville, California, co designed by John Lasseter and Steve Jobs. So while this production was going on, they were also moving studio as well. One of the big problems that they had on Monsters Inc. Was making the fur move realistically. Solly is an 8 foot tall horned monster with a 700 pound body covered in blue green fur. Having animators animate his fur by hand would have been an impossible task. Developing hair simulation software that can control hair movement was the answer. Other studios had tackled realistic fur, most notably rhythm and hues in its 1993 Polar Bear commercials for Coca Cola and in its talking animal faces in the 1995 film Babe. However, rendering the characters of Monsters, Inc. Required fur on a much larger scale. Sully would have 2,320,413 individual hairs on his body and they had to make sure that the hairs cast shadows on other ones and that the hairs reacted correctly to lighting. A program called Deep Shadowing was created to help achieve the effect. They also developed a new system for fog, smoke, steam and other atmospheric shading effects. Even variations in snow were physically impossible to achieve. Before Monsters, Inc. The scene where Sully crashes out in the snow was one of the most technologically advanced scenes in the movie because it involved fur reacting to wind and snow. They also created over a million individual snowflakes. So how did they Create the fur for Sully. Well, they started with creating a ball of fur, and then they ran simulations with that fur, reacting to certain movements. They made the fur wet and slimy. They braided it. The animators grew so attached to the fur ball that they made monsters with it. Most obviously one of the other monsters on the scare floor who is a furball with tentacles. So they're basically just taking all of the unused stuff and just adding it to make other monsters. They would run multiple simulations of the fur on different scenarios to see how it moved and interacted with other things. So they test Sully walking, running, jumping, scratching and clapping, and test the weight of the fur. Solly also ran an obstacle course, but the first time he ran it, the fur would glitch, stretch, and catch on objects. Instead of animating each hair one by one, Pixar computer scientists created a program called Fizt, short for Physics Tool, which would automate the movement of Sully's hairs based on what's happening in any given scene. Pixar would later use the same system to simulate realistic fur on animal characters like Remy the rat in Ratatouille and Doug the dog in Up. Fizt would create how hair moves with a character's movements, or how hairs collectively respond to forces like gravity, wind, or snow. Pixar would use Fizt on its future movies to give realistic movements to everything from human flesh fabrics, water to octopus tentacles. It took about two years to write the cloth simulation software used in Monsters, Inc. The challenge was trying to make a physical simulation work in a cartoon world. Blue's T shirt had to respond to the body moving underneath and it not be distracting in any way. They had to consider the density and weight of the fabric, how gravity affects it, and how quickly the folds pull out. When her body stops moving, the shirt had to stop moving as well. Going from Toy Story's plastic bodies to a bug's life's exoskeletons. Monsters, Inc. Was the first time Pixar had flexible bodies to work with. Every main character in the movie had its own lead animator. John Cars on Sully, Andrew Gordon on Mike, and Dave Divan on Boo. And this was the first time in Pixar's history that each character had a lead animator. Later iterations of Sully also had him wearing a pair of black glasses, but these were removed because Pixar wanted his eyes to be readable and and it was felt glasses took away from that. To design Monstropolis, the production team of Harley Jessup and Bob Pauley went to local Factories, refineries, assembly plants, blimp hangers, and other industrial sites that could inspire their designs. Adjacent to the old Pixar studios in Point Richmond was a Chevron refinery, and that provided good research with its maze of pipes and structures for transporting gas. At John Lasseter's urging, the production designers took a field trip to Pittsburgh to observe firsthand what an older company town built around factories might look like. Inspiration for the individual workstations on the stair floor came from classic bowling alley designs. They envisioned the Monsters Inc. Factory as a 60s era Modernist building and the surrounding city having buildings of over 100 years old and slightly run down buildings struggling to survive an energy shortage. As children become less susceptible to scares, they came up with a logic that the Scarers would source a door, pull the door off the track, look it into a station, and now it would become a portal to the real world where they would go in to pull a screen out of a room, and the screen would be collected in metal canisters. The door vault would contain over 5.7 million individual doors that would run on monorail tracks. Fizt also came in here. With the software generating millions of unique doors and the realistic movement of doors on tracks. They mixed and matched 26 colours, 12 styles and eight wood colours with various doorknobs and decals. Jessup worked closely with art director Tia Kratter to define the colour palette and shading textures for the characters and the sets. Dominique Louis, who also served as art director on the film, did lighting studies and beautiful pastel drawings to help define the overall ambiance of the film. Fundamentally, they wanted the Monsters to be the most colourful things in Monstropolis. So the city was coloured somewhat muted. The brighter colours were saved for the characters themselves, so they would really stand out. And the city itself has some fun additions and puns, like Tony's grocery spelled G R O S S E R Y rather than G R O C E R Y. As well as the restaurant Harryhausen's, named of course, in homage to Ray Harryhausen. The scene in which the Harryhausen's restaurant was decontaminated was originally going to feature the restaurant being blown up. And this scene was animated and finished. But then 911 happened and the animation was quickly redone and the explosion was replaced by a plasma dome to avoid upsetting viewers. One of the major new technical innovations of Monsters, Inc. Was the creation of a new department to keep track of all of the elements that go into creating a shot, appropriately called the shots department. This area was under the supervision of simulation and effects supervisor Galen Sussman. A team of seven sequence supervisors and 16 shot supervisors worked on her team to assemble and render every shot in the film. Galen Sussman was the person responsible for saving Toy Story 2. The story of that's in episode 112, and she was actually laid off from Pixar in 2023 after working at the company for almost 30 years. And this was Pixar's real venture into a world other than our own. And Monstropolis is beautifully realized. It's a similar world to our own, but caters to monsters, both tiny, large, slimy and furry, but environmentally close to our own. Monsters can travel to our world and still breathe our air. For example, Boo can run riot through the Monstropolis city centre, but there's still toilets to relieve herself. This is a world of showing, not telling. There's no room for exposition. You understand the scare floor and how it all works immediately. And the bright colours aren't just limited to the movie itself, but also its titles. Pete Docter is a fan of the modern looking 2D animation of the 1950s, animation that calls back Disney to itself. In movies like Sleeping Beauty, the title sequence intentionally pays homage to the work of graphic designer and filmmaker Saul Bass Bass. Most famous title sequences include Alfred Hitchcock's north by Northwest and Psycho, and the title sequence was designed by animator and illustrator G. Free Bodo. And it is time to segue into the very first obligatory KEANU reference of 2026. Now, if you're new here and you don't know what that's it, what this is, this is a part of the podcast where I try and link every movie that I feature with Keanu Reeves for no reason other than he is the best of men and continues to be the best of men. I can't really link him to Pixar unless I go the Toy Story 4 route, which to be honest, I've done a few times, so I feel like I can't really do that anymore. But both Keanu and John Goodman have appeared in Waiting for Godot. Keanu recently on Broadway in 2025 with his bill and Ted co star Alex Winter, and Goodman on Broadway in 2009 with Bill Irwin, John Glover and Nathan Lane. I have to add, I've not seen Waiting for Godot. I don't think it's anything like Monsters Inc. If I'm being completely honest. But moving on to the music, because Monsters Inc. Marks the fourth feature film collaboration between Pixar and acclaimed composer and songwriter Randy Newman, and it would give him his first Academy award win after 16 nominations for best Original Song for the song if I Didn't have you sung by John Goodman and Billy Crystal. Newman also composed the score, a mix of 1940s jazz and big band influences. He would also win a Grammy for the song too. So Pixar released an early teaser trailer for Monsters, Inc. In October 2000, which was distributed online and included on home video releases of Toy Story 2. It was later attached to 102 Dalmatians theatrically and also appeared on the Emperor's New Grief DVD in May 2001 because DVDs did used to include trailers at one point in time. Another trailer premiered in cinemas in June 2001 with Atlantis the Lost Empire. I am just listing previous episodes of this podcast here. Monsters Inc. Premiered at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood on 28 October 2001, but the release of the movie was almost delayed by a lawsuit. The lawsuit was filed by Laurie Madrid, writer of a short story called There's a Boy in My Closet. The lawsuit named Pixar, Disney and Chronicle Books as defendants, and it was claimed that they had stolen Madrid's story and used it as inspiration for Monsters, Inc. Madrid wrote the short story in 1999 and sent it to many publishers, including Chronicle Books. Madrid believed Chronicle Books forwarded it to Pixar, who then used it to come up with Monsters, Inc. Madrid requested a preliminary injunction to block the release of the film until the court case was complete. So on the 1st of November 2001, the day before the film's release, the film's director, Pete Docter, and Dick Cook, chairman of Disney's Motion Pictures Group, appeared before a judge in a Wyoming courthouse. Both Doctor and Cult took the stand and doctor explained that Madrid's book had no impact on the Monsters, Inc. Story or film development and how the development of the film had begun years before Madrid wrote her story. After an entire day in court, the judge ruled in favour of Pixar and Disney and denied Madrid's request for an injunction on the release of Monsters Inc. So it was released the following day on 2 November 2001, and the cinema release was accompanied by Pixar short for the Birds. It opened at number one at the box office, stayed at number one for two weeks before being dethroned by Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, or Sorcerer's Stone. It would stay in the top 10 for 10 weeks. At the time, Monsters Inc. Held the record for having the biggest opening weekend worldwide of an animated film, making $84.8 million. That was surpassed in 2007 with the Simpsons Movie, which David Silverman also directed. Monsters Inc. Was also the last Pixar movie to include a blooper reel until they reintroduced them for Elio in 2025. The Incredibles technically also had animated outtakes, but those were part of the actual film and were only available on the DVD release. Monsters Inc's blooper reel includes the reveal of the renowned company play by the Monsters Inc. Company players. Put that thing back where it came from Also help me on its 115 million dollar budget, Monsters Ink would gross 255.9 million dollars domestically and 272.9 million dollars internationally for a total worldwide gross of 528.8 million dollars. It would become the third highest grossing movie of 2001 worldwide after Harry Potter and the Philosophers Slash, Sorcerer's Stone and the Lord of the Rings the Fellowship of the ring. On its DVD release it would sell 5 million copies in its first day on Rotten Tomatoes. It has a rating of 96% with a consensus reading Clever, funny and delightful to look at, Monsters Inc. Delivers another resounding example of how Pixar elevated the bar for modern all ages animation. It was nominated for four Academy Awards Best Animated Feature, Best Original Score, Best Original Song, Best Sound Editing. As I mentioned it would win Best Original Song. It lost Best Animated Feature the inaugural award to Shrek. I still think this is better than Shrek, only marginally, but I think the animation holds up so much better. It would be nominated for and win the BAFTA for the BAFTA Children's Award for Best Feature Film. It would also be nominated for eight Annie Awards, winning Outstanding Character Animation. A prequel titled Monsters University was released on 21 June 2013. John Goodman, Billy Crystal and Steve Buscemi reprise their roles of Sully, Mike and Randall, Dan Scanlon directed Monsters University and the prequel plot focuses on Sully and Mike's studies at Monsters University, where they start off as rivals but soon become friends. In 2017, Bob Iger announced a TV series for Disney set in the Monsters Inc. Universe called Monsters at Work, which premiered on Disney plus on 7th July 2021. Based on and a direct continuation of Monsters Inc. It features the voices of John Goodman and Billy Crystal reprising their roles. Pixar did not produce the series, it was instead produced by Disney Television Animation. Its first season debuted on Disney plus and its second on the Disney Channel. There were plans for a direct theatrical sequel to Monsters Inc. Which would have been called Monsters Inc. Two Lost in Scaradise. The film would have focused on Mike and Sully visiting the human world to give Boo a birthday present, only to find that she had moved after getting trapped in the human world. Mike and Sully would split up after disagreeing on what to do. It ultimately never happened, not because Pixar thought the idea was bad, but because Pixar wasn't even involved. Let me explain. So when Disney and Pixar partnered up to release animated movies in the 1990s, the original contract was for seven films with success of Toy Story 2. At the end of 1999, then Disney CEO Michael Eisner and then owner of Pixar, Steve Jobs, began to disagree on how Pixar should be run and the terms of their continued relationship. Eisner claimed that Toy Story 2 as it was a sequel did not count towards the original film count of the agreement, and Steve Jobs disagreed. After those seven films up to and including Cars were completed, Pixar said they would not renew their agreement with Disney and so Disney created its own animation division called Circle 7 Animation. The original Disney and Pixar partnership meant that Disney owned the story and character rights to the movies and could legitimately make their own sequels without Pixar's involvement. And the Monsters Inc. Sequel was set to be developed by Circle 7 Animation now due to Disney's purchase of Pixar in January 2006. On 26 May that year, Disney shut down Circle 7 Animation and transferred most of the studio's employees to to Walt Disney Feature Animation, which was renamed Walt Disney animation studios in 2007. Circle 7 Animation had several Pixar sequels planned in various stages of development at the time, including Monsters Inc. 2, Lost in Scaradise, Finding Nemo 2 and the Circle 7 version of Toy Story 3. Those movies were all cancelled following Circle 7's closure, and the idea for Monsters Inc. 2 Lost in Scaradise would eventually morph into Monsters University and become prequel. So Monsters Inc. Was released and was a big success. So you would think that that would be the end of the story, but no, because in 2002 another lawsuit was filed against Pixar and Disney about Monsters Inc. In the federal court in San Francisco by a poster artist called Stanley Mouse. He claimed that Monsters Inc. Stars Mike and Sully were derived from a one eyed creature called Wise G'Eye and a larger monster who often appeared together in his cartoons going back to 1963 and strongly resembled a character drawn by him. As part of his ideas for a film called Excuse My Dust, which was Set in Monster City, where the animated monsters worked for the Monster Corporation of America. Stanley Mouse had unsuccessfully tried to sell the idea for Excuse My Dust to Hollywood studios in 1998. Drawings attached to the complaint dating from the early 1960s have a small two legged eyeball with a large, dull witted monster character in a buddy friendship. The law suit also claimed that a story artist from Pixar visited him in 2000 and discussed his work with him. A Disney spokeswoman responded saying that the characters in Monsters Inc. Were developed independently by the Pixar and Walt Disney Pictures creator teams and do not infringe on anyone's copyrights. The case was ultimately settled under undisclosed terms. It seems strange now that in 2026, 25 years ago, Pixar in 2001 was still an up and coming studio with just a few hits under its belt. Their fourth movie being a buddy movie just like Toy Story and Toy Story 2 might not have whetted too many appetites, but early Pixar proved that their concepts and imaginations were second to none. And Monsters Inc. Really is no exception. The power of fear really is the key to this movie. Yes, it's gorgeous, the voice acting is great and it's incredibly well conceived and executed. But fear powers everything. Fear powers the city of Monstropolis. Quite literally, fear powers the levels of screams a monster can elicit from a child. The scarier the monster, the bigger the screams. A fear the monsters have against coming into contact with human children. Fear of the unknown. What could be behind that door? What was that noise I heard downstairs? But like most movies made by Pixar, it translates to both a child and adult audience. For adults, it's the fear of letting your children go of their child growing up. The fear of disappointing your child, overcoming your fears is the grander theme of this movie. And this just perfectly segues into the relationship between Sully and Boo, which is the emotional core of the movie. Sully is afraid at first she's a foreign object in his world and society deems her toxic. But he grows to care for her and they become inseparable. Boo brings out a gentleness in Sully he he never saw in himself before her. To her he is not a monster, he's Kitty. When he has to demonstrate his scare ability and inadvertently frightens Boo, he finally shows her his true form, sees what he's doing to her, and therefore every single child he's ever scared, and he's ashamed at what he's become. Boo makes him want to be better. It also brings to mind that many of us don't question the status quo. The monsters are told children are toxic and they have a whole agency, the Child Detection Agency, to find and disinfect child exposure. In reality, they're just overreacting to socks, but they're told it, so they believe it. They're told the only way to power their world is through fear, so they just believe it, even though they're also told there's a scammer shortage. Sully and Mike literally risk everything to expose the corruption in the company, knowing that it's shutting down means no power and no jobs for the countless workers who rely on this factory remaining open. But to be honest, when the options are exposing the scheme or letting innocent children be kidnapped and tortured, it seems pretty clean cut. But the levels of fear mongering the Monstropolis News reporting a child breach, showing interviews with residents among whom conspiracy theories and fake news are already in circulation. The segment concludes with a creature who says in my professional opinion, it is now the time to panic. That this movie came out just after 911 is remarkably prophetic. Either that or COVID 19 Pete Docter, like pretty much all of us, grew up on Disney movies and the Muppets, and now he's made a movie, many in fact, that the next generations grew upon. It must be very weird, but also comforting to know that you've inspired the next generation's love as something wholly unique. It must be very gratifying, but also, like most of the best movies aimed at a family market, Monsters Inc. Takes something that could actually be quite dark and brightens it. Not so much that the darkness disappears, but if you look closely, the dark themes are then our childhood fears were fuelling capitalism in Monstropolis. Basically, they cleverly designed the monsters to not look too monstrous, lest children wouldn't want to watch it. It makes them friendly and funny when they're not working, and we don't really see too much of them actually scaring for kids to actually be afraid. And kids watching will be laughing, which as we know is much more potent than screams anyway. Of course, there are still some ethical questions about generating power and revenue through the unpaid labour of children at night while they should be asleep. But then, Monsters Incorporated is hardly an ethical workplace. In the mere six years since Toy Story, Monsters Inc. Represents a huge leap in storytelling, world building and animation. The colours and textures are vibrant. The world is way bigger than anything Pixar had attempted before. Even the vast corridors of Monsters Incorporated feel twisty and winding and lit with fluorescent lamps and that huge foyer with a tiny reception desk, the roller coaster of all the doors moving together, it all still looks so great. As a technological achievement, Monsters, Inc. Shines. And as an emotional achievement, Monsters, Inc. Shines that maybe we shouldn't judge a book by its cover. That we shouldn't fear otherness. That maybe we should prioritize joy and laughter. And maybe grown ups could learn a thing or two about conquering their fears. Because while laughter is more powerful than fear, Sully can never see Boo again. And her door ends up in the wood chipper. And once the company starts to harness laughter and all the monsters become comedians, Sully carries a splinter of wood with him to remind him of that little girl that changed his life. And that final scene where Sully finally gets to reunite with Boo and she gleefully yells out kitty. Sully's smile says it all. Less fear, more love. If it works to make the monsters more human, it might make us humans less monstrous. Thank you for listening. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on Monsters, Inc. And thank you for your continued support of this podcast. If you want to show your support in multiple different ways, you could leave a rating or review wherever you found this podcast. You could tell your friends and family about this podcast or you can find me and follow me on social media and you can share the podcast that way. I am @VerbalDiorama. You can share posts like posts, comment on posts. It all helps really to get the word out there and hopefully get other people to know this podcast and know what I've been doing. I genuinely love doing this podcast and anything you could do to help would be so appreciated. So the next episode animation season continues and you came at a bad time but you just crossed the line. You want to get wild? Okay, I'll show you wild. Knocking you out like a lullaby. Hear that podcast ringing in your mind. Better sit down for the show because I'm gonna show you how K Pop Demon Hunters was done, done, done. I am so excited for this episode. This movie came out of nowhere in 2025. It is a celebration of Korean culture and food, music and folklore. So join me next episode for the history and legacy of K Pop Demon Hunters. 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