Japanese sweets, SNL skits, Office Space, and giant scorpions.
Now, Deamer and Production Designer Ricky Nierva are back in the monster world, a world they populated.
So, how did the sex-change come about?
Also, we were in love with the old design so we had a hard time losing it.
We pinned all that stuff on the wall and brought in the director and nothing was really hitting.
Ugh, thats creepy.
RN:Thats the same reaction we had, that was exactly what we were looking for!
We wanted that visceral ugh, that thing that makes you creeped out.
We had it in this poor coordinators office for the longest time!
It was so inspiring when you see it move.
The animators just see this beautiful grace, so that was the bottom part of her.
At what point did Helen Mirren become involved?
RD:After we designed it, and she really was amazing.
She brought this character to the next level.
Art
RN:Art is one of my favourite characters.
He brings up all these non-sequitur kinds of things.
Dan Scanlon was saying that theres always a classmate who makes you ask, how old is this person?
How long have they been in school?
A lot of these characters have first and last names, but Art is just Art.
At one point, the design was a ball with legs coming out of it.
The animators love it, because they can do so many things with it.
JD:They were thrilled immediately when they saw it.
We were like this is perfect!
because its soft and its got this appealing powdery feel, theres just something appealing about it.
RN:And its sweet when you eat it, its like him.
JD:So we actually photographed it and said, make the skin look like that, its perfect.
Dan Scanlon really loves this character.
Its that combination of finding the character and the designs all hitting those things for him.
JD:Dan had the voice down like really, really early on.
He was doing the scratch voice performance initially.
He had the accent down and he had that character really crystallised in his mind early on.
RN:I love the little details.
That batwing moustache motif was brilliant, and the receding hairline.
RN:Hes also got the magic pocket with all of his business cards.
He looks like Milton from Office Space.
JD:Yeah, totally, that came up.
Archie the Scare Pig
We were told that Archie the pig was based on Dan Scanlons Japanese Chin dog?
JD:Oh yeah.
What do you do?
And thats exactly what we heard when we presented our new designs to John Lasseter.
He said, To be honest, I dont really see the difference.
Its hard to tell.
We added this little tuft of faux-hawk hair on the top of his head.
Eighteen-year-old Randall
RN:Randy was one of the biggest challenges.
It was really a way of justifying it.
Monsters University comes out in the UK on Friday the 12th of July.
