Scary monsters, super treat!

“It’s easy to tell a boring story,” explains Pete Docter, the director of Monsters Inc., the surefire new smash from Pixar, the crew who brought us A Bug’s Life and the Toy Story series. As well as out-grossing its predecessors, Monsters Inc. looks like it will be involved in a straightforward scrap with Shrek for the inaugural Oscar for Best Animated Film. How hopeful is Docter about Pixar’s chances?

“Well, I’m tryin’ not to, like, dwell on it too much ‘cause you never know, you never know what’ll happen. But I think it’s generally really good for the industry – ‘cos there’s a lot of films that get done every year that people don’t hear about.

“Monsters is obviously a different case, Disney do such a good job publicising that you’d want to kinda live in a cave to not know it’s coming out. Hopefully, though, y’know, that Oscar is going to encourage people to come and see some of the lesser-known animated films. We’ve got a built-in audience already, on the poster in the US it says ‘from the makers of Toy Story’ and I think that gets a lot of people.’ In the States, we’ve actually already surpassed our highest-grossing film up to this point, which was Toy Story 2. And I think generally it’s aimed at the same sort of audience – we try to entertain ourselves while we’re making it, but we also keep kids in mind.”

How important a component is the ‘fear’ factor, with reference to scaring kids?

“It’s a tricky thing, ‘cause to remain true to the subject matter, they have to be monsters, they have to be genuinely scary, but then you also have to counter-balance it. It shows the truth about monsters. And in fact, we have had a couple of letters from parents saying ‘thank you, our child is no longer scared of monsters’.”

What was the extent of John Lassiter’s involvement in the film, and how did Docter come to direct it?

“Well, when I started at Pixar, it was John, Andrew Stanton and me sitting down to work and coming up with the story, and then as it got bigger I went on and became supervising animator. And when that was done, we said ‘hang on, this is gonna be four and a half years for every film that we do, I don’t think the company will be able to survive producing films that infrequently. So John said ‘why don’t you skip A Bug’s Life’, which he was just starting to direct, ‘and come up with something else’. And I really loved working on the Toy Stories, so many friends of mine said ‘hey, I believed that my toys came to life too’. So I was trying to think if there were other things like that, and monsters came to mind. And that’s kinda where the idea came from.”

Monsters Inc. is on general release