Monsters, Inc.

United States

2001

94 Min

Color

1.85:1

English

Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
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DIR Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, David Silverman

EXEC John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton

SCR Pete Docter, Jill Culton, Jeff Pidgeon, Ralph Eggleston, Andrew Stanton, Daniel Gerson

CAST John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Mary Gibbs, Steve Buscemi, James Coburn, Jennifer Tilly, Bob Peterson, Frank Oz, Bonnie Hunt

ED Robert Grahamjones, Jim Stewart

PROD DES Harley Jessup, Bob Pauley

In the world behind our closet doors, monsters like Mike and Sulley work hard for their income. To be exact, the monster world depends on our children’s screams: It is their energy that makes lightbulbs glow and cars drive. Big companies like Monsters, Inc. collect the scream energy, and many monsters work there in shifts. In these times, it is getting harder and harder to shock the kids properly, since they’re so spoiled by television, so that there’s an energy shortage in the monster world. Sulley, the number one frightener, one day accidentally lets a human child into the monster world. Since kids are supposed to be poisonous and carry loads of diseases, pandemonium ensues. After Mike and Sulley discover that the girl they named Boo actually seems quite harmless, they decide to bring her back through her door into her room. But Boo’s presence is more than just a mere accident. Now, Mike and Sulley have to face an enemy within their own ranks. ―IMDb

Director

Pete Docter

Pete Docter came in on the ground level of arguably the most creative, technologically cutting-edge studio in filmdom, essaying a fantasy-filled childhood into some of the most spectacular and whimsical feature films of the late 1990s and 2000s. At just 21 years of age, Docter became one of the first employees of Apple Computer honcho Steve Jobs’ boutique computer-animation shop, Pixar, going on to work as a writer and animator on the company’s groundbreaking animated comedies “Toy Story” (1995) and “Toy Story 2” (1999). He conceived and directed “Monsters, Inc.” (2001) and went on to originate two features that would earn the studio some its most glowing praise and most substantial profit – “WALL E” (2008) and the adventure-comedy spectacle “Up” (2009) which returned Docter to the director’s chair. A self-admitted archetypal nerd growing up in the Midwest, Docter achieved every film geek’s dream by boasting multiple award nominations and wins for his timeless tales enjoyed by both… read more

Pete Docter came in on the ground level of arguably the most creative, technologically cutting-edge studio in filmdom, essaying a fantasy-filled childhood into some of the most spectacular and whimsical feature films of the late 1990s and 2000s. At just 21 years of age, Docter became one of the first employees of Apple Computer honcho Steve Jobs’ boutique computer-animation shop, Pixar, going on to work as a writer and animator on the company’s groundbreaking animated comedies “Toy Story” (1995) and “Toy Story 2” (1999). He conceived and directed “Monsters, Inc.” (2001) and went on to originate two features that would earn the studio some its most glowing praise and most substantial profit – “WALL E” (2008) and the adventure-comedy spectacle “Up” (2009) which returned Docter to the director’s chair. A self-admitted archetypal nerd growing up in the Midwest, Docter achieved every film geek’s dream by boasting multiple award nominations and wins for his timeless tales enjoyed by both children and adults, as well as commanding the respect of the industry as one of the most admired creators of high-tech animated fantasy at the most celebrated movie shop in show business.

He was born Peter Hans Docter on Aug. 10, 1968, in Bloomington, MN to Rita and Dave Docter, a music teacher and a college choral director, respectively. Peter’s two sisters followed the family’s musical imprimatur, becoming accomplished in stringed instruments, but while Peter developed proficiency in music, he gravitated more towards visual storytelling. Tall and socially awkward from an early age, he became an introverted child, living largely in his imagination. Inspired by the cartoons of Disney, Chuck Jones and the Golden Age of radio comedy, he gravitated from an early age toward the visual, making cartoon flip-books and short animated films with the family’s movie camera. More preoccupied with his art than his classes and harboring dreams of working for Disney, he was a poor student, though he did establish a comedy imprint at Bloomington’s Kennedy High, where he and a friend turned the morning announcements into a regular comedy routine. After graduating high school, he attended the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, MN for a year before being accepted into the cartoonist’s hotbed, the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA. There, he would win a Student Academy Award for the film “Next Door,” a hand-drawn cartoon about a grumpy old man bugged persistently by an irrepressible neighbor girl. With two other animated shorts to his name, he was already fielding job offers as graduation neared in 1990 – most notably from Fox’s fledgling animated sitcom, “The Simpsons” (1989- ) and Pixar, a small shop filled with computer-imaging techies that had once been a unit of George Lucas’ Lucasfilm Limited, which had later been purchased by Steve Jobs in 1986.

Docter chose the struggling company Pixar, starting at the company’s Emeryville, CA, headquarters the day after graduation as only the third animator hired. Headed by John Lasseter, the company proved to be a veritable creative cauldron that promoted talented minds to create while being uninhibited by typical Hollywood creation-by-committee. Docter worked on several commercials and, given the company’s small staff, found himself doing more than just animation; he began writing, creating music, and eventually collaborating on the story for what would become the company’s Lasseter-directed feature-film debut, “Toy Story.” He supervised the animation on the pioneering computer-animated movie, a colorful tale of a cadre of children’s toys who come to life when the child is out of the room, featuring the voices of Tim Allen as the brash new toy in the chest, Buzz Lightyear, and Tom Hanks as the once-beloved cowboy action-figure, Woody, whom Lightyear threatens to usurp. Picked up for distribution by Disney, “Toy Story” proved a blockbuster, fulfilling Docter’s earlier dreams to boot. It also netted him his first Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, as well as an Annie Award for his animation work. He did storyboard work for the studio’s next feature “A Bug’s Life” (1998), and contributed the story treatment for the next year’s successful sequel, “Toy Story 2,” which would earn him another Annie Award for writing.

Docter’s own vision would give rise to the studio’s 2001 release, “Monsters, Inc.,” the story of Sulley and Mike (voiced by John Goodman and Billy Crystal, respectively), two everyday pathos-ridden monsters who happen to make a living scaring children in the night. With Docter given directorial duties on the first Pixar feature not to be helmed by Lasseter, it entrenched the studio’s ethos as an engine of ostensible children’s movies that worked on so many layers as to be funny and entertaining for adults too. Subversive in its anti-establishment subtext, it gave Disney, as The New York Times observed, “the last leg up by stealing the style and speed of Warner Brothers cartoons, which used to ridicule Disney’s do-gooder ethos.” It also earned Docter another Oscar nomination; this time for Best Animated Feature, and another Annie nod as director, even as it won him the BAFTA Children’s Award in the U.K. In the wake of Pixar’s blockbuster, “The Incredibles” (2005), he made his credited voiceover debut in the special DVD add-on feature, “Mr. Incredible and Pals” (2005), playing the campy fictional voice of a TV-cartoon version of Mr. Incredible, to the chagrin of the real Mr. Incredible. He next penned the original story that Pixar would make into “WALL E” (2008), which would earn the company and its now official parent company Disney – which acquired Pixar in 2006 – widespread laud as a more fluid next-generation of CG-animation, telling the story of a lonely service droid left cleaning up the detritus of a since-space-bound humankind and the nearly silent love story involving him and a “female” droid sent scan the planet. The film was broadly hailed as not just an animated spectacle, but as a cinematic masterpiece, going on to garner Docter yet another writing Oscar nomination and win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film.

But behind the scenes, Docter, along with colleague Bob Peterson, had been working on another project as early as 2004, based on a simple sketch the former had done of a box-shaped scowling old codger. They conceived the story of Carl Frederickson (voiced by Ed Asner), a grumbling curmudgeon who, after losing his wife of many years, hatches a plan to attach enough balloons to their house to make it airborne, hoping to pilot the makeshift vehicle to a hidden tropical idyll in South America that they had always wanted to visit together. Docter’s 12-year-old daughter Ellie, one of two children he had with his wife Sharon, lent the voice to Frederickson’s wife as a young girl. With obvious overtones of Docter’s student film, “Next Door,” Docter and Peterson added a stowaway to the trip, a pestering, effervescent neighborhood kid attempting to earn a scout merit-badge by helping the elderly. In spring 2009, “Up,” a far-flung adventure, a mismatched-buddy comedy and an introspective story of loss and mortality became the rave of the Cannes Film Festival. An advance notice of the film in Time magazine projected it to be “one the most satisfying movie experiences of its year… The story of a septuagenarian grouch who uses his cane, hearing aid and dentures to thwart all evild rs; a buddy movie whose pals are separated by 70 years; a love story that transcends the grave – has there been a movie like this in the history of feature animation?” By early 2010, “Up” had won two Golden Globes and earned eight Annie nominations, two of those to Docter for writing and directing. Due to the Academy’s recent inclusion of 10 Best Pictures nominations, “Up” shockingly nabbed Oscar nods in two categories – Best Feature Film and Best Animated Feature Film – leaving no doubt as to the industry’s appreciation for the unique crowd pleaser. To no one’s surprise, Docter would go on to win in the latter Oscar category. —TCM

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Lee Unkrich

Lee Unkrich (born August 8, 1967) is an American director and film editor. He is a longtime member of the creative team at Pixar, where he started in 1994 as a film editor. He later began directing, first as co-director of Toy Story 2. After co-directing Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo, Unkrich made his solo directorial debut with Toy Story 3, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2011. Unkrich is the 2011 recipient of University of Southern California’s Mary Pickford Distinguished Alumni Award recognizing alumni contributions to the cinematic arts. With the award, Unkrich joins a list of distinguished USC alumni including Robert Zemeckis, Walter Murch, Jon Landau, Gary Rydstrom and Jay Roach.

A native of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, Unkrich spent his youth acting at the Cleveland Playhouse. Unkrich graduated from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts in 1990. Before joining Pixar in 1994, Unkrich worked for several years in television… read more

David Silverman

While not a household name like Matt Groening, animation director David Silverman was arguably one of the most instrumental behind-the-scenes craftsmen of the perennial sitcom family, “The Simpsons” (Fox, 1989- ). Silverman was a struggling animator in the 1980s – before the boom in feature film and prime-time animation – and was on the verge of quitting when he took a chance on a series of short bumpers about a dysfunctional cartoon family on “The Tracey Ullman Show” (Fox, 1987-1990). A key player in laying the ground rules for transforming Groening’s two-dimensional drawings into characters who seemed to live and move about in a three-dimensional space, Silverman also directed countless episodes during the first several seasons. After going off to try his hand on other projects, including a co-directing stint on the feature hits “Monsters Inc.” (2001) and consulting on “Ice Age” (2002), Silverman was brought back to fictional Springfield to direct the long-awaited, “The Simpsons Movie”… read more

While not a household name like Matt Groening, animation director David Silverman was arguably one of the most instrumental behind-the-scenes craftsmen of the perennial sitcom family, “The Simpsons” (Fox, 1989- ). Silverman was a struggling animator in the 1980s – before the boom in feature film and prime-time animation – and was on the verge of quitting when he took a chance on a series of short bumpers about a dysfunctional cartoon family on “The Tracey Ullman Show” (Fox, 1987-1990). A key player in laying the ground rules for transforming Groening’s two-dimensional drawings into characters who seemed to live and move about in a three-dimensional space, Silverman also directed countless episodes during the first several seasons. After going off to try his hand on other projects, including a co-directing stint on the feature hits “Monsters Inc.” (2001) and consulting on “Ice Age” (2002), Silverman was brought back to fictional Springfield to direct the long-awaited, “The Simpsons Movie” in 2007.

Silverman was born on Mar. 15, 1957 in New York, NY. Like many children, he loved drawing; but unlike most, he created comic strips and crudely animated “flip-books” – enough that, by the tender age of 4, Silverman already knew that he wanted to draw for a living when he grew up. He would later credit his parents for encouraging him – his father loved old comedies and exposed him to W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. When the Silverman family lived in Europe for a spell, his mother, an art historian, made sure to take him to museums. His interest in comic books and cartoons only deepened during his childhood, learning early on the difference between the animation of Warner Bros. and Hannah-Barbera cartoons – subtle distinctions that served him well when he pursued animation for a living.

As he grew up, Silverman recognized the difficulty in making a living as an animator, leading him to shift his career pursuits toward architecture. Still, he was the typical high school “artist,” providing illustrations for the yearbook and drawing cartoons for the student newspaper. He also delved into clay animation, winning a prize for a short film at the Kodak Teenage Movie Awards – a contest for amateur filmmakers. Through the contest, Silverman met fellow aspiring animator Eric Goldberg, who would go on to a successful Hollywood career in animation, directing the Walt Disney feature “Pocahontas” (1995). The two immediately hit it off and encouraged each other’s success in the early stages of their careers. Meanwhile, Silverman enrolled at the University of Maryland to study architecture. But after two years, the lure of his true passion led him to transfer to the University of California, Los Angeles to study film and animation.

At UCLA, Silverman narrowed his focus to hand-drawn animation, taking advantage of his lifelong skills; while on the side, he drew cartoons for The Los Angeles Times and provided illustrations for a line of music books for children. Already two years behind at the start, he scrambled to complete his first student project, “The Strange Case of Mr. Donnybrook’s Boredom,” based on the Ogden Nash poem. To complete the project in time, Silverman would throw parties for fellow students, who showed up on weekends to pitch in with painting cells and finishing the artwork. The effort paid off – the film earned high marks and drew praise at student film festivals. After graduating from UCLA with a master’s degree, Silverman landed a low-level animation job at Ruby-Spears, the company that produced several Saturday morning cartoon shows. Silverman’s first job was assisting lead animators on “Mr. T.” (NBC, 1983). While happy to be working in animation in Hollywood, Silverman, along with his colleagues, were ambitious and eager for something more.

The animation business in the mid-1980s was not as robust as it would later become – feature films had yet to enjoy their comeback, and most television cartoons lacked sophistication, being aimed at young children. Over time, Silverman became disenchanted – he had also grown tired of living paycheck to paycheck as a freelance animator. He was all but decided on leaving the field when, at the urging of a friend, he looked into a job at a small graphics and animation company which had just landed a contract to provide 30-second animated bumpers for a new sketch comedy show. The show turned out to be “The Tracey Ullman Show,” and the animated segments featured Matt Groening’s creation, “The Simpsons.”

Silverman joined the team thinking he only be employed for two weeks. But when producers saw his work, they hired him as a full-fledged animator; the shorts, meanwhile, took on a life of their own, thanks in part to the guidance of producer James L. Brooks. Debuting in April 1987, the shorts were crudely drawn – as compared to the later series -with Bart looking like a derelict who tested the patience of his frumpy, blue-collar dad, Homer. Taking advantage of the fledgling Fox Network’s desire for new and edgy programming to fill its timeslots, Brooks and company developed a spin-off of the shorts. “The Simpsons” debuted in December 1989, becoming the first prime-time animated sitcom since “The Flintstones” (ABC, 1960-66). Silverman directed the pilot episode, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” where Homer is rescued by family pet Santa’s Little Helper when his plan to raise money for Christmas goes awry. From that moment on, the show maintained a long, steady presence on a station not known at the time for churning out hits.

Silverman was largely credited with laying down the rules for the show, determining guidelines for drawing the characters and the world they occupied, while ensuring that the characters were rendered consistently in scene after scene, show after show. Despite the sheer flexibility that animation provided, Silverman asserted the necessity of the characters seeming to exist in a reality governed by simple laws of physics in order for believability to be sustained. Silverman and his staff spent much of the first season correcting errors and re-drawing sequences, using several artists and animators subcontracted from companies in Korea. Meanwhile, Silverman continued to guide the show for several seasons, which began taking a permanent residence atop the pop culture zeitgeist. Over the years, he oversaw changes in technology and the introduction of computers to speed up parts of the assembly-line process of animation, such as in storyboarding and coloring. Throughout it all, Silverman and his colleagues avoided two factors which usually dogged successful shows – suggestions from the network and aging actors.

While still working on “The Simpsons,” Silverman wrote an episode of the animated series, “Beetlejuice,” (syndicated, 1989-1991); was a designer for the “The Critic,” (ABC, Fox, 1994-95); and directed an animated segment in the feature film “Robocop 3” (1993). But despite his success, Silverman felt the need to stretch his legs creatively. He left “The Simpsons” to direct his first feature, “Road to El Dorado” (1998) – also notable for being the first animated film for DreamWorks SKG, a studio that was intent on making significant inroads into animation. Though “El Dorado” was no blockbuster and failed to draw rave reviews, Silverman went on to co-direct the 2001 Pixar hit, “Monsters, Inc.” He then served as a story consultant on the Fox animated blockbuster, “Ice Age,” and was an animation consultant on “Looney Tunes: Back in Action” (2003).

Over the years, fans speculated and producers hinted at the possibility of the Simpsons appearing in a feature film. When the time inevitably came, Silverman was called in to direct. Despite advances in technology and strides in realistic computer graphics, the movie retained its two-dimensional cartoon look, albeit with a slightly bigger scope. With a massive marketing campaign that included 12 7-Eleven stores converting into Kwik-E-Marts across the country and Homer Simpson (voiced by Dan Castellanata) doing the opening monologue on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” “The Simpsons Movie” (2007) elevated the show on the pop culture landscape.

In his off time, Silverman was also a musician – he enjoyed playing the tuba at the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert – and had, in fact, originally suggested that the character of Lisa play a tube (it was Groening who made the slight adjustment to a jazz saxophone). He even appeared as animated version of himself, with the tuba, in the eighth-season episode, “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show.” —TCM

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