It's Film Strip Friday! Monsters Inc.

It’s Film Strip Friday!

Monsters Inc.

Release Date November 2^nd, 2001

 

          

SYNOPSIS:

Scaring up a few good screams is all in a night's work for the employees at Monstropolis' Scare Factory -- and nobody does it better than Sully and his best buddy Mike. It's dangerous work because there's nothing monsters fear more than a human child. When one of these terrifying creatures ends up back in Monstropolis, it's up to the buddies to get her home without getting in trouble ? but they'll have to foil a dastardly plot first. Big, good-natured Sully and tiny, excitable Mike are a perfect team of odd-couple pals, who find that adorable little girl Boo changes everything they thought they knew about humans and monsters alike.

FUN FACTS:

Monsters, Inc. is a 2001 American computer-animated comedy-adventure film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and directed by Pete Docter. Co-directed by David Silverman, the film stars two monsters who work for a company named Monsters, Inc.: top scarer James P. Sullivan (John Goodman)—known as "Sulley"—and his one-eyed assistant, Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal). Monsters generate their city's power by scaring children, but they are terribly afraid themselves of being contaminated by children, so when one enters Monstropolis, Sulley finds his world disrupted.

Docter began developing the film in 1996 and wrote the story with Jill Culton, Jeff Pidgeon, and Ralph Eggleston. Fellow Pixar director Andrew Stanton wrote the screenplay with screenwriter Daniel Gerson. The characters went through many incarnations over the film's five-year production process. The technical team and animators found new ways to render fur and cloth realistically for the film. Randy Newman, who composed Pixar's three prior films, returned to compose their fourth.

Released theatrically in November 2001 by Walt Disney Pictures, Monsters, Inc. proved to be a major box office success, generating over $525,366,597 worldwide. In addition, the film received highly positive reviews from film critics and audiences, who praised both the humor and heart of the movie. The film did suffer negative publicity in the form of two lawsuits against the filmmakers that were ultimately dismissed. Monsters, Inc. will see a 3D re-release in theaters in 2012, followed by the release of a prequel, Monsters University, due in 2013.

Plot

In a parallel world, the city of Monstropolis is inhabited by monsters and powered by the screams of children in the human world. At the Monsters Inc. factory, employees called "Scarers" venture into children's bedrooms to scare them and collect their screams, using closet doors as portals. This is considered a dangerous task since the monsters believe children to be toxic and touching them would be fatal. However, production is falling as children are becoming harder to scare and the company chairman Henry J. Waternoose III is determined to find a solution.

The top Scarer is James P. "Sulley" Sullivan, who lives with his assistant Mike Wazowski and has a rivalry with the ever-determined chameleon-like monster Randall Boggs. During an ordinary day's work on the "Scarefloor", another scarer accidentally brings a child's sock into the factory, causing the Children Detection Agency (CDA) to arrive and cleanse him. Mike is constantly harassed by Roz, an aging slug-like clerk, for not completing his paperwork on time.

While working late at the factory, Sulley discovers a door has been left on the Scarefloor, still activated. While investigating, he discovers a young girl (Mary Gibbs) has entered the factory and is forced to hide her away in a bag. Mike is at a restaurant on a date when Sulley comes to him for help, but chaos erupts when the girl escapes from the bag and enters the restaurant. Sulley and Mike escape the CDA and take the girl back to their home, discovering that she is not toxic after all. Sulley quickly grows attached to the girl, nicknaming her "Boo". The next day they smuggle her into the factory and Mike attempts to return her through her door. Randall, who was responsible for letting her out, tries to kidnap Boo, but kidnaps Mike by mistake.

Sulley and Boo follow Randall into the depths of the building, discovering he has built a "Scream Extractor" to remove a child's screams by force, making the company's current tactics redundant. Sulley rescues Mike and they flee, going to Waternoose for help. However, Waternoose is revealed to be in allegiance with Randall and Sulley and Mike are exiled to the Himalayas. The two are taken in by the Abominable Snowman who tells Sulley he can return to the factory through a nearby village. Sulley heads out, but Mike refuses to follow out of frustration. Returning to the factory, Sulley rescues Boo from the Scream Extractor and reunites with Mike, and they reconcile soon after. Randall pursues them as they race through the factory and ride on a door that is being returned to storage, taking them into a giant vault where millions of closet doors are stored. Boo's laughter activates the doors and allows the chase to pass in and out of the human world. After Randall nearly kills Sulley by pushing him out of an open door, they exile Randall by throwing him through the door to a trailer park.

They are finally able to access Boo's door, but Waternoose and the CDA send it back to the Scarefloor. Mike distracts the CDA, while Sulley escapes with Boo and her door while Waternoose follows. Waternoose is tricked into into confessing his plan to kidnap children in a simulation bedroom and is arrested by the CDA. The CDA's leader is revealed to be Roz, who has been undercover for years trying to prove there was a scandal at Monsters Inc. Boo is returned home, and on Roz's orders the door must be destroyed. Sulley and Mike say their last goodbyes, then the door is put through a shredder. Sulley becomes the new chairman of Monsters Inc., and thanks to his experience with Boo, he comes up with a plan to end the company's energy crisis.

Months later, Sulley's leadership has changed the company's workload. The monsters now enter children's bedrooms to entertain them, since laughter is ten times more powerful than screams. Mike takes Sulley aside, revealing he has almost rebuilt Boo's door, while requiring one more piece which Sulley took as a memento. Sulley enters and reunites with Boo.

Voice cast

• John Goodman as James P. "Sulley" Sullivan – Sulley is a giant furry blue friendly and sweet monster with horns and purple spots. Even though he excels at scaring children, he is kind hearted and thoughtful by nature. Sulley is relatively laid-back, and has a relaxed and outgoing happy personality.
• Billy Crystal as Michael "Mike" Wazowski – Mike is a green monster with a ball-shaped body, a single big eyeball, and skinny arms and legs. He runs Sulley's station on the scare floor, and they are close friends and roommates. Mike has an outgoing personality and is dating Celia Mae. He has an ego that often makes him forget something obvious, such as how his face is obscured in advertisements for the company. He makes cameo appearances in Finding Nemo, Cars, WALL-E and Toy Story 3.
• Mary Gibbs as Boo – A 2-year-old human girl who is unafraid of any monster except Randall, who regularly scares her at night. She overcomes her fear of Randall by the end of the movie. She refers to Sulley as "Kitty". The book based on the film gives Boo's "real" name as Mary Gibbs, the name of her voice actress. In the film, Boo shows Sulley a drawing of Randall with the name "Mary" signed in the corner.
• Steve Buscemi as Randall Boggs – An impatient, multi-legged lizard-shaped monster with a chameleon-like ability to change skin color and blend in completely with his surroundings. He is Sulley's rival in scream collection.
• James Coburn as Henry J. Waternoose III – A crab-like monster with five eyes. At the start of the film, he is CEO of Monsters, Inc., the job having been in his family for three generations, though he has a much more sinister plot in store. He somewhat holds a mentor-like relationship with Sulley, believing him to the best scarer, but the energy crisis has caused him to run up the sinister plot, putting him in odds against Sulley.
• Jennifer Tilly as Celia Mae – A gorgon-like monster with one eye, snakes for hair, and tentacle-like legs. She is Mike's girlfriend and the receptionist for Monsters, Inc.
• Bob Peterson as Roz – A slug-like monster with a raspy voice (similar to Selma Diamond's). She is the administrative clerk for Scarefloor F. At the end of the film she turns out to be the Child Detection Agency's (CDA) "Number One", working undercover for years to reveal the child kidnap plot. She holds a great deal of power over the rest of the CDA, even knowing human contact is not poisonous to monsters.
• Frank Oz as Jeff Fungus – Randall's red-skinned three-eyed assistant and reluctant participant in the plot.
• John Ratzenberger as The Abominable Snowman – A yeti banished to the Himalayas. He gave Mike and Sullivan shelter after they were banished. He frequently offers them lemon-flavored snow cones made from the snow that he collects. He is also a relative of Bigfoot who like him and the Loch Ness Monster were also banished.
• Samuel Lord Black as George Sanderson – A furry monster with a horn on top of his head, he was frequently assisted by Charlie. He is the butt of a running gag in which he repeatedly contacts human artifacts by accident (due to the static cling of his fur), triggering "23–19" incidents and humorously overblown reactions by the CDA resulting in the removal of his hair.
• Dan Gerson as Smitty and Needleman – Two goofy monsters with cracking voices who work as janitors and operate the Door Shredder when required.
• Jeff Pidgeon as Thaddeus "Phlegm" Bile – A trainee scarer for Monsters, Inc.
• Bonnie Hunt as Ms. Flint – A snake-like monster who trains new monsters to scare children.

Production

Development

The idea for Monsters, Inc. was conceived in a lunch in 1994 attended by John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft during the production of Toy Story. One of the ideas that came out of the brainstorming session was a film about monsters. "When we were making Toy Story", Pete Docter claimed, "everybody came up to me and said that they totally believed that their toys came to life when they left the room. When Disney asked us to make more films, I wanted to tap into a child-like notion that was similar to Toy Story. I knew monsters were coming out of my closet when I was a kid. So I decided monsters would be appropriate".Docter's initial concept for the film went through many changes, but the notion of monsters living in their own world was found by Docter as an appealing and workable one. Docter's original idea revolved around a 30-year-old man dealing with monsters (which he drew in a book as a boy) coming back to bother him as an adult. Each monster represented a fear he had, and conquering those fears caused the monsters eventually to disappear.

Pete Docter began work on the film that would become Monsters, Inc. in 1996 while others focused on A Bug's Life (1998) and Toy Story 2 (1999). Its code name was Hidden City, so named for Docter's favorite restaurant in Point Richmond. By early February 1997, Docter had drafted a treatment together with Harley Jessup, Jill Culton, and Jeff Pidgeon that bore some resemblance to the final film. In that story, titled simply Monsters, the character of Sulley (known as this stage as Johnson) was an up-and-comer at his workplace, where his job was to scare children; his eventual sidekick, Mike Wazowski, had not yet been added. Docter pitched the story to Disney with some initial artwork on February 4, 1997. He described Monsters as a buddy story between Johnson and a little girl, Mary. He and his story team left with some suggestions in hand and returned to pitch a refined version of the story on May 30, 1997. At this pitch meeting, longtime Disney animator Joe Grant—whose work stretched back to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)—suggested the title Monsters, Inc., which stuck.

The voice role of James P. "Sulley" Sullivan went to John Goodman, the longtime co-star of the comedy series Roseanne and a regular in the films of the Coen brothers. Goodman interpreted the character to himself as the monster equivalent of a National Football League player. "He's like a seasoned lineman in the tenth year of his career," he said at the time. "He is totally dedicated and a total pro." Billy Crystal, having regretted turning down the part of Buzz Lightyear years prior, accepted that of Mike Wazowski, Sulley's one-eyed best friend and scare assistant.

In November 2000, early in the production of Monsters, Inc., Pixar picked and moved for the second time since its Lucasfilm years. The company's approximately 500 employees had become spread among three buildings, separated by a busy highway. The company moved from Point Richmond to a much bigger Emeryville campus, co-designed by Lasseter and Steve Jobs.

Writing

After Docter scrapped the initial concept of a 30-year-old terrified of monsters, the lead human character became a little boy for a while, and ultimately a little girl, named Mary. In a subsequent treatment on August 8, 1997, Mary became a fearless seven-year-old who had been toughened by years of teasing and pranks from four older brothers. Johnson, in contrast is nervous—nervous about the possibility of losing his job after the boss at Monsters, Inc. announces a downsizing is not he way. He feels envious because another scarer, Ned, is the top performer in the company. As the story continued to develop, the central adult figure was changed to a child of varying ages (8-12) and gender. Ultimately, the story team decided that a young innocent girl would be the best counterpart for a furry 8-foot co-star. Boo was originally later planned to be aged six, but was changed to 3 years of age, because "The younger she was, she became the more dependent on Sulley," Docter claimed.

Sulley and Boo went through radical changes as the story evolved between 1996 and 2000. Sulley went from a janitor, to a refinery worker, to a former scarer working in a refinery because an accident cost him his eyesight, to his final incarnation as the best scarer at Monsters, Inc. Boo developed into a domineering, out-of-control little girl—comparable to the kidnapped boy in O. Henry's 1910 short story "The Ransom of Red Chief"—before becoming a mild, innocent, preverbal girl. After Boo became a girl, she continued to undergo changes, at one point being from Ireland and at another time to be Pixar's first African-American character. The idea of a monster buddy for the lead monster emerged at an April 6, 1998 "story summit" in Burbank with Disney and Pixar employees. The term coined by Lasseter, a "story summit" was a crash exercise that would yield a finished story in just two days. Such a character, the group agreed, was give the lead monster someone to talk to about his predicament. Docter named the character MIke for the father of his friend Frank Oz, a director and Muppet performer. Development artist Ricky Nierva drew a concept sketch of Wazowski that everyone was generally receptive to, and further drafts would include the character in a starring role.

Screenwriter Dan Gerson joined Pixar in 1999 and worked on the film for almost two years with the filmmakers on a daily basis. Gerson considered it his first experience writing a feature film. Dan Gerson explains; "I would sit with Pete and David Silverman and we would talk about a scene and they would tell me what they were looking for. I would make some suggestions and then go off and write the sequence. We'd get together again and review it and then hand it off to a story artist. Here's where the collaborative process really kicked in. The board artist was not beholden to my work and could take liberties here and there. Sometimes I would suggest an idea about making the joke work better visually. Once the scene moved on to animation, the animators would plus the material even further."

Animation

In production, Monsters Inc. differed from earlier Pixar features in that each main character had its own lead animator: John Kahrs on Sulley, Andrew Gordon on Mike, and Dave DeVan on Boo. Kahrs found that the "bearlike quality" of Goodman's voice provided an exceptionally good fit with the character. He faced a difficult challenge, however, in dealing with Sulley's sheer mass; traditionally, animators conveyed a figure's heaviness by giving it a slower, more belabored movement, but Kahrs was concerned that such an approach to a central character would give the film a sluggish feel. Like Goodman, Kahrs came to think of Sulley as a football player, one whose athleticism enabled him to move quickly in spite of his size. To help the animators with Sulley and other large monsters, Pixar arranged for Rodger Kram, an expert at Berkeley, on the locomotion of heavy mammals, to come in and lecture on the subject. Sulley was originally planned to have tentacles for feet, however, this caused many problems in early animation tests. The idea was later largely rejected, as it was thought the audience would commonly look at the tenticles rather than Sullivan's face. Sullivan was also planned to wear glasses throughout the film, which was conceived by the directors at one point, but the creators found it a dangerous idea and it was rejected as well, because they found the eyes were a perfectly readable and clear way of personally expressing the eyes of a character. The first fur test was with Sullivan running an obstacle course. Results were not sastifactory, as fur would get caught by objects and stretch the fur out because of the extreme amount of motion. Another simillar test was also unsuccessful with the fur going through the objects. Jeff Pidgeon and Jason Katz story-boarded a test in which Mike was helping Sulley choose a tie for work and Mike Wazowski soon became a vital character in the movie. Originally Mike had no arms, and had to use his legs as appendages, however due to technical difficulties arms were soon added.

Adding to Sulley's lifelike appearance was an intense effort by the technical team to refine the rendering of fur. Other production houses had tackled realistic fur, most notably Rhythm & Hues in its 1993 polar bear commercials for Coca-Cola and in its talking animals' faces in Babe (1995). Monsters, Inc., however, required fur on a far larger scale. From the standpoint of Pixar's engineers, the quest for fur posed several significant challenges. One was figuring out how to render the huge numbers of hairs—2,320,413 on Sulley—in a reasonably efficient way. Another was making sure the hairs cast shadows on other hairs. Without self-shadowing, fur or hair takes on an unrealistic flat-colored look (The hair on Andy's toddler sister, as seen in the opening sequence of Toy Story, is an example of hair without self-shadowing.)  The fur simulation techniques became part of a new program called Fizt (for "physics tool"). After a shot with Sulley had been animated, Fizt took the data for the shot and added his fur, taking into account his movements as well as the effects of wind and gravity. The Fitz program also controlled movement on clothing, which provided another breakthrough.  The deceptively simple-sounding task of animating cloth meant solving the complex problem of how to keep cloth untangled—that is, how to keep it from passing through itself when parts of it intersect. Michael Kass, senior scientist at Pixar, was joined on Monsters, Inc. by David Baraff and Andrew Witkin and developed an algorithm they called "global intersection analysis" to handle cloth-to-cloth collisions. The complexity of the shots in Monsters, Inc.—including elaborate sets such as the door vault—required more computing power to render than any of Pixar's earlier efforts combined. The render farm in place for Monsters Inc. was made up of 3500 Sun Microsystems processors, compared with 1400 for Toy Story 2 and only 200 for Toy Story.

Release

The film was theatrically released on November 2, 2001 in the United States, in Australia on December 26, 2001, and in the United Kingdom on February 8, 2002. It was released on VHS and DVD on September 17, 2002, and on Blu-ray on November 10, 2009. After the success of the 3D re-release of The Lion King, Disney and Pixar announced a 3D re-release of Monsters, Inc. for December 19, 2012, leading up to the premiere of Monsters University.

Reception

Box office

Monsters, Inc. ranked No.1 at the box office its opening weekend, grossing $62,577,067 in North America alone. The film had a small drop-off of 27.2% over its 2nd weekend, earning another $45,551,028. In its 3rd weekend the film experienced a larger decline of 50.1%, placing itself in the second position just after Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. In its 4th weekend, however, there was an increase of 5.9%. Making $24,055,001 that weekend, it is the 7th biggest (in US$) 4th weekend ever for a film. As of September 26, 2002, the film has a total of $255,873,250 in the United States and Canada and $269,493,347 in other territories for a worldwide gross of $525,366,597. The film is Pixar's sixth highest grossing movie worldwide and fifth in North America. For a time, the film went on to take the place of Toy Story 2 as the second-highest-grossing animated film of all-time, behind only The Lion King (1994).

In the UK, Ireland and Malta, it earned £37,264,502 ($53,335,579) in total, marking the 6th highest-grossing animated feature of all time in the country and the 32nd largest movie of all time. In Japan, although earning $4,471,902 during its opening and ranking 2nd behind The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring for the weekend, on subsequent weekends it moved to first place due to exceptionally small decreases or even increases and dominated for six weeks at the box office. It finally reached $74,437,612, standing as the third highest-grossing film of 2002 and the third largest US animated feature of all time in the country behind Toy Story 3 and Finding Nemo.

Critical reception

The film received a very positive reception. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 95% of critics gave the film a positive review based on 167 reviews, with an average score of 7.9/10. The critical consensus was: "Even though Monsters, Inc. lacks the sophistication of the Toy Story series, it is a still delight for children of all ages." Another review aggregator, Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 top reviews from mainstream critics, calculated a score of 78 based on 34 reviews.

Charles Taylor from Salon.com stated: "It's agreeable and often funny, and adults who take their kids to see it might be surprised to find themselves having a pretty good time." A. O. Scott from The New York Times gave a positive review saying: "There hasn't been a film in years to use creative energy as efficiently as Monsters, Inc." Mike Clark from USA Today also gave a positive review saying: "Though the comedy is sometimes more frenetic than inspired and viewer emotions are rarely touched to any notable degree, the movie is as visually inventive as its Pixar predecessors." Reelviews film critic James Berardinelli, who gave the film 3½ stars out of 4 wrote: "Monsters, Inc. is one of those rare family films that parents can enjoy (rather than endure) along with their kids." Roger Ebert, film critic from Chicago Sun-Times, while praising the movie with 3 out of 4 stars, wrote: "Monsters, Inc. is cheerful, high-energy fun, and like the other Pixar movies, has a running supply of gags and references aimed at grownups." Lisa Schwarzbaum, a film critic for Entertainment Weekly gave a B for the movie and wrote: "Everything from Pixar Animation Studios, the snazzy, cutting-edge computer animation outfit, looks really, really terrific, and unspools with a liberated, heppest-moms-and-dads-on-the-block iconoclasm."

Accolades

Monsters, Inc. won the Academy Award for Best Original Song (Randy Newman, after 15 previous nominations, for If I Didn't Have You). It was one of the first animated films to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Film (lost to Shrek). It was also nominated for Best Original Score (lost to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring) and Best Sound Editing (lost to Pearl Harbor).

At the Kid's Choice Awards in 2002, it was nominated for "Favorite Voice in an Animated Movie" for Billy Crystal (who lost to Eddie Murphy in Shrek).

American Film Institute Lists

• AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs:
• If I Didn't Have You – Nominated
• AFI's 10 Top 10 – Nominated Animated Film

Music

Monsters Inc. was Randy Newman's 4th feature film collaboration between Pixar and Newman. The end credits song "If I Didn't Have You" was sung by John Goodman and Billy Crystal.

The album was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score and a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. The score lost both these awards to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, but after 16 nominations, the song "If I Didn't Have You" finally won Newman his first Academy Award for Best Original Song. It also won a Grammy for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media.

All songs written and composed by Randy Newman.

No.	Title	Length
1.	"If I Didn't Have You" (performed by Billy Crystal and John Goodman)	3:41
2.	"Monsters, Inc."	2:09
3.	"School"	1:38
4.	"Walk to Work"	3:29
5.	"Sulley and Mike"	1:57
6.	"Randall Appears"	0:49
7.	"Enter the Heroes"	1:03
8.	"The Scare Floor"	2:41
9.	"Oh, Celia!"	1:09
10.	"Boo's Adventures in Monstropolis"	6:23
11.	"Boo's Tired"	1:03
12.	"Putting Boo Back"	2:22
13.	"Boo Escapes"	0:52
14.	"Celia's Mad"	1:41
15.	"Boo Is a Cube"	2:19
16.	"Mike's in Trouble"	2:19
17.	"The Scream Extractor"	2:12
18.	"Sulley Scares Boo"	1:10
19.	"Exile"	2:17
20.	"Randall's Attack"	2:22
21.	"The Ride of the Doors"	5:08
22.	"Waternoose is Waiting"	3:14
23.	"Boo's Going Home"	3:34
24.	"Kitty"	1:20
25.	"If I Didn't Have You" (performed by Newman)	3:38
Total length:		1:00:30

Lawsuits

“The effect of [a preliminary injunction] would be devastating,” Dick Cook said.

Disney had set the [release] date far in advance, close to a year ago. Disney had primed audiences with about forty thousand trailers in movie theaters and a costly ad campain. There had been a “giant press junket” two weeks earlier with Docter and Lasseter and the film’s stars. The company had already spent about $3.5 million on a premiere and special screenings. Everything had been choreogrophed to peak on November 2. Tomorrow”

-        David Price, in his book The Pixar Touch (2008)

Shortly before the film's release, Pixar was sued by children's song writer Lori Madrid of Wyoming, claiming that the company had stolen her ideas from a 1997 story she penned, titled "There's a Boy in My Closet." Madrid mailed her story around to half-dozen publishers in October 1999, notably a San Francisco publishing house called Chronicle Books. No publishers expressed interest in the story, so she instead turned it into a local stage musical in the summer of 2001. As the summer came to a close, several her friends and coworkers began urging her to see a trailer for Monsters, Inc., believing the film to be plainly based on her story. Madrid reached the same conclusions after seeing the trailer herself.

After searching on the Internet, Madrid found that a book titled The Art of Monsters, Inc. had recently been published by Chronicle. Pixar had previously published books with Disney's in-house publishing arm, Hyperion. She concluded that Chronicle passed her story to Pixar in 1999, and Pixar had reciprocated by switching to Chronicle. After finding a lawyer, she filed suit in October 2001 against Chronicle Books, Pixar, and Disney in a federal court in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Her lawyer asked the court to issue a preliminary injunction that would forbid Pixar and Disney from releasing the film while the suit was pending. Over their objections, however, the judge ordered a hearing on the motion for a preliminary injunction to take place on November 1, 2001 — the day before the scheduled release of Monsters, Inc. on 5,800 screens in 3,200 theaters across the country.

Docter and Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group chairman Dick Cook testified on Thursday, November 1 in Cheyenne as planned. Cook stated the effect of a preliminary injunction against the release of the film would be devastating, as Monsters, Inc. was one of the company's "tent-pole" films for the season. The 5,800-odd prints, he said, had already gone out from Technicolor's warehouses in California and Ohio and were sitting at theaters. Judge Clarence Brimmer did not issue the injunction and Monsters, Inc. opened as planned on November 2, nationwide. Brimmer ruled on June 26, 2002 that the film had simply nothing in common with the poem.

Stanley Mouse lawsuit

A lawsuit was filed in a federal court in San Fransico a year after the film's release, which Stanley Mouse alleged that the characters of Mike and Sulley were based on drawings of Excuse My Dust that he had tried to sell to Hollywood in 1998. He said the film's main characters, 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.

Dust would be set in Monster City, where the animated monsters worked for the Monster Corporation of Americahe. The lawsuit also claimed that a story artist from Pixar visited Mouse in 2000 and discussed Mouse's work with him. In the film, Mike and Sully live in Monstropolis and work for Monsters, Inc.

A Disney spokeswoman responded that only the characters in Monsters, Inc. were "developed independently by the Pixar and Walt Disney Pictures creative teams, and do not infringe on anyone's copyrights".

Prequel

A prequel called Monsters University will be released on June 21, 2013. John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Steve Buscemi, Jennifer Tilly and Frank Oz are reprising their roles of Sulley, Mike, Randall, Celia and Fungus, while Dan Scanlon is directing the movie. The prequel's plot focuses on Sulley and Mike's studies at the University of Fear, where they start off as rivals but soon become best friends.

Other media

Additional short film

An animated short, Mike's New Car, was made by Pixar in 2002 in which the two main characters have assorted misadventures with a car Mike has just bought. This film was not screened in theaters, but is included with all home video releases of Monsters, Inc., and on Pixar's Dedicated Shorts DVD.

Manga

A manga version of Monsters, Inc. was made by Hiromi Yamafuji and distributed in Kodansha's Comic Bon Bon magazine in Japan; the manga was published in English by Tokyopop until it went out of print.

Video games

A series of video games, including a multi-platform video game were created based on the film.

Walt Disney's World on Ice

Feld Entertainment toured a Monsters, Inc. edition of their Walt Disney's World on Ice skating tour from 2003 to 2007.

Theme park attractions

Monsters, Inc. has inspired three attractions at Disney theme parks around the world.

• In 2006 Monsters, Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue! opened at Disney California Adventure Park at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California. The dark ride was developed to boost the theme park's lagging attendance, and was quite successful in doing so for a short time.
• In 2007 Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor opened at the Magic Kingdom at the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, replacing The Timekeeper. The show is improvisational in nature, and features the opportunity for Guests to interact with the monster comedians, and even submit jokes of their own via text message. The attraction has been praised for its originality.
• In 2009 Monsters, Inc.: Ride & Go Seek opened at Tokyo Disneyland at the Tokyo Disney Resort in Chiba, Japan.

http://disney.go.com/disneyinsider/history/movies

http://en.wikipedia.org