Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/147928
Monsters University takes place 15 years earlier. Mike, again voiced by Crystal, has a retainer and wears a cap. Sully, again voiced by Goodman, is thinner, has bed-head hair, and a big attitude. They are college freshmen. Mike arrives determined to become the top scarer. Sully comes with a reputation as a top scarer already. The two become instant competitors, with each trying to top the other. But, they both end up in the fraternity with all the misfits, the only one that would take them. How could Oozma Kappa possibly win the scare competition? "One of the challenges of any sequel is that it's creating a new game from an existing game," says Director Dan Scanlon. "It's like creating a new game using chess pieces and only those pieces. With a prequel, you have the added difficulty in that everyone knows how the story ends. So, you have to own that fact and use it to tell the story." In the story, we see the scarers in their formative youth and discover how they became the characters that starred in Monsters, Inc. They are teenagers in Monsters University, much less experienced than in the first film. Sully is an arrogant jock. He slouches during class, with a "who needs it" attitude. Mike is bookish, determined. He edges toward things, on the defensive against any blows that might come his way. When the production crew at Pixar made Monsters, Inc. 11 years ago, it, too, was in its formative youth. The popular comedy was the studio's fourth animated feature. Monsters, Inc. had one hairy character – Sully. The film met a CG milestone when Boo, the little girl in the loose T-shirt, touched Sully's hair. Now, many of the students matriculating at Monsters University are hairy monsters, monsters in costumes, and hairy monsters in costumes that hug, sit, wear backpacks, and carry books. "With every Pixar movie, we have some technical achievement," Scanlon says. "On this film, one of the biggest challenges was how big the film is." Monsters University has approximately 400 characters, of which 25 percent have hair, often hair all over their bodies. While Boo's T-shirt was the only costume in the original film, Monsters University's characters wear 127 garments. Eighty-nine percent of the shots use a simulation to move something – hair, cloth, grass, flags, pages in textbooks, and so forth. Fortunately, the production side of the movie-making team could tell Monsters University's story using new "chess pieces." "It's a prequel, and we had to respect the design of the original film to fit into that world, but we wanted to use state-of-the-art technology," says Sanjay Bakshi, supervising technical director. "We built a huge population of monsters and made sure some could be procedurally animated in a crowd pipeline. We had a CG W July / August 2013 ■ 11