Mike Wazowski, voiced by Billy Crystal, is back in this year’s Monsters University.
MUSE’s interview with the director (Dan Scanlon) and the producer (Kori Rae) of Monsters University, the prequel to 2001’s Monsters Inc..
Q: Thank you very much for doing this. How did the idea of a prequel for Monsters Inc. come about?
DAN: Early on, we loved the characters of Mike and Sulley and we loved the relationship of Mike and Sulley. And we always wanted to do something with them again. We kind of got together and talked about what that might be. As I said before, we love the relationship. 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, and we loved the idea of doing something in a university.
Why a university? Did you hope to appeal to an older audience with this choice?
DAN: I think we just knew that we wanted the characters to be somewhat familiar adults. We wanted this to be a story about how they became friends.
KORI: I think we thought that … age between 18 and 22 is so crucial in all of our lives, whether you went to college or not … 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, all of that stuff, and so that was also really appealing, I think.
How did you go about presenting a realistic, relatable view of college while staying family friendly?
DAN: What are you talking about? (laughs) What’s going on in college? We had to be careful about it. 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 eight-year-old birthday party with knocking over tables and eating too much food and smashing things and screaming.
What were some inspirations for the personalities and looks of other characters in the film?
DAN: I think we wanted to make sure that since we were doing a university movie that we had sort of the great university archetypes. And characters that felt like people that we went to school with, or certainly reminded us of people we went to school with. 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 — they 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 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. And we have a character Art, who we always think of as sort of just that weird guy at college that you don’t know anything about.
Kori, how have your previous film experiences prepared you for the production of this film?
Kori: Ah, good question. I was associate producer on Monsters Inc. and just had such a great experience working with [director Pete Docter] on that film. So when I heard that Monsters University was in the works, I knew that I wanted to work on it. Here, we learn so much on every single film, but you learn something different from each one because you’re working with different people [and] different directors.
I used a ton of stuff on this film that I had learned on The Incredibles, let’s say, um, in addition to Monsters Inc. and even as far back as A Bug’s Life, when I managed the animation department. So all of that experience just rounded me out and gave me a good base to produce this one.
What would either of you say was the most challenging part of putting together a production like this?
DAN: We probably both agree that it is [the] story. It takes the most time in a lot of ways. 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.
KORI: And the sheer number of characters and the variety of characters that we had to have in this film, to populate the university. So 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 ten twelve characters in the foreground. And then have hundreds of characters in the background. So just the scope of the film from a character standpoint was definitely a challenge.
What would you like audience members, specifically college students, to take away from this film?
DAN: We want it to be a really fun college movie, but we also want to — we always want to touch something in people emotionally with our films. We feel like this film is very much about what happens when you come up […] and how you let go of the thing that you think you absolutely have to be to be happy in order to find out who you truly are.
And I think that’s definitely something I experienced in college — that feeling of realizing this is going to be a lot harder than I thought. Or maybe I’m not the person that I thought I was. And rather than giving up completely, really finding out who you are. That sense of self-discovery.
KORI: Yeah, exactly, self-discovery and friendship. And what that means as you go along that path of figuring out who you are and how important friendship is.
Monsters Inc. will be in U.S. theaters June 21.
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