NSU offers a wide variety of undergraduate majors, including musical theater, history, software engineering and criminal justice. But one subject that it does not have even a single course in is scaring. No, in order to study with the world’s foremost experts in the prestigious academic field of scaring, you’d have to transfer to Monsters University — the fictional institution of Disney-Pixar’s latest film.
“Monsters University”, the prequel to 2001’s “Monsters, Inc”, will unleash its beloved kooky creatures to theaters on June 21. Lead characters Mike and Sulley are back — or rather, the film takes its viewers back, revealing how the not-so-scary duo first met and quickly became not best friends, but enemies, as classmates in the university’s elite Scare Program.
Director Dan Scalon, who joined Pixar in 2001 as a storyboard artist, said that the creative team was itching to bring back the furry friends, who are again voiced by Billy Crystal and John Goodman.
“We loved the relationship of Mike and Sulley and we always wanted to do something with them again and we got together and talked about what that might be,” said Scalon. “And that’s where we started thinking about how these guys met and learning a little bit more about that. Which led naturally to the college idea; we loved the idea of doing something in a university.”
Scalon said that they settled on the college setting, because, “If we went back too far and did Monsters Elementary, we didn’t feel like that would be the Mike and Sulley that we remember and love.”
Producer Kori Rae — who previously worked on “Up”, “The Incredibles” and “Toy Story 2”, among others — said that the film’s creators were especially drawn to crafting college-aged characters because it’s a time of incredible self-discovery.
“We thought that it’s kind of a coming of age. That age between 18 and 22 is so crucial in all of our lives, whether you went to college or not,” said Rae. “That’s kind of where you first are out on your own; you just figure out who you are, who you want to be. You can reinvent yourself, so that was also really appealing.”
One major challenge that the animators faced was making the characters look younger. Crafting the 18-year-old version of a middle-aged human is one thing, but turning the clock back on fictional monsters is another.
“Our art department did a really good job trying to study, ‘how do you make an eyeball look younger?’ And we started to notice that thinning them up really helped. We were all a little thinner in college,” said Scalon.
Yet, the characters’ makeovers aren’t too drastic.
“It was important that they were recognizable, so we had parameters that we wanted to make sure that we kept,” said Rae. “We didn’t want to do anything too crazy because they still needed to look like Mike and Sulley.”
Another struggle came in the sheer volume of characters. Monsters University is, after all, a university — meaning that there had to be a diverse array of students.
Rae said, “It was a lot for the Character Department, and it was also a lot for the Animation Department, who had to animate, scene after scene of anywhere from six to 10 or 12 characters in the foreground and then have hundreds of characters in the background.”
Scalon added, “And all those characters are totally different. Some have two legs. Some are slugs. Some are flying. It’s tough work; they’re so individual.”
Although MU’s student body may look quite a bit different from NSU’s — many with neon fur and dozens of eyes — Scalon said that the characters are based on real students, at least in personality.
“We wanted to make sure that we had the great university archetypes and characters that felt like people that we went to school with,” he said. “We have new characters in the film that are part of a fraternity called the Oozma Kappa fraternity. And they’re kind of a less popular fraternity of scarers that were kind of scare rejects, if you will. They didn’t get into the scaring program. We have a character, a Scott Squishy Squibbles, who is kind of your classic 18-year old college student that hasn’t decided what they want to be. They show up at school, unaware of what exactly they want to become and then they’re sort of a ball of clay waiting to be molded and then, in his case, he’s literally a mushy tiny ball of amorphous clay.”
“Monsters University” is far from the first film set on a college campus, but many popular ones are far from family appropriate. Scalon said that his team had to make sure they captured the college spirit, without veering away from the Pixar feel.
“We had to be careful about it,” he said. “The good thing is we were able to get a lot of wild fun behavior that still reads as sort of fun party college but is probably no different than the wild crazy stuff that goes on in an 8 year old’s birthday party, with knocking over tables and eating too much food and smashing things and screaming.”
As if done for most films, Scalon and his team had to complete a fair amount of research. So, they set out to explore one of the world’s most intriguing environments: college campuses.
He said, “We wanted do just walk around and soak it up and see buildings and the fraternities and sororities and just kind of get our heads set back into the college student mindset. It was a really good opportunity and the artists came and actually drew buildings and drew sorts of campuses and in the end, put them all together to create a campus that, although it’s original to ‘Monsters University’, hopefully it feels familiar to everyone. I would hope that everyone kind of feels like ‘hey, that’s my school.’”
And just as students learn a tremendous amount at college, Rae said that she received her own education through working on the film.
“Early on, as we were developing this story, I learned so much about how difficult this is and it made me even more aware of and and surprised that we ever pull one of these things off,” she said.
Working on the film was apparently also quite a lot like tackling a challenging college course, as Scalon called it “maddening at times”.
“Every Pixar film goes through a number of iterations. We’re always trying different versions of the movie to find our way toward the right version,” he said. “Every Pixar movie goes through an awkward teenage phase where it doesn’t make sense or it’s bizarre or it’s not quite working right. And you can get terrified that you’re never going to crack it. It’s just this relentless journey to just keep trying new things.”
