(Cover) - EN Movies - Dan Scanlon didn’t want to let fans down by directing a “second rate” Monsters Inc. sequel.
The writer-and-animator helms the hotly-anticipated Monsters University. He was aware of how much pressure was on him to impress cinemagoers following the success of the original family film.
“The hard thing is I’m a huge fan of the first movie,” he told Mania. “And it’s a great movie. You don’t want to let that movie down by making a second-rate follow-up. I was lucky to get people who’d worked on the first film and some who hadn’t. So you get that sort of familiarity and then that new breath of fresh air.”
Monsters University goes back in time to focus on the fraught relationship between Mike and Sulley when they were still studying.
Dan has explained why the sequel took so long to follow the first instalment featuring the voices of Billy Crystal and John Goodman, which was released in 2001.
“We really didn’t think about the possibility of doing a sequel right away… And then in time we just realised we miss these characters… And that's where we got the idea of meeting them when they were young,” he revealed. “The Monster College notion just seemed great, but also the idea of doing a story about Mike and dealing with failures in life, which we thought that most movies don’t deal with a lot. A lot of times, people say if you work hard and never give up, it will always work out, which is a great message. However, it’s not always the case in life. And we really wanted to make a movie for people who were dealing with that.”
Dan went on to admit that trying not to scare children watching Monsters University was a “fine line” but he is confident younger audiences will “connect” with it.
“We want people to be on the monsters’ side, kids especially. I hope that even though this movie deals a lot with fear, you’re always with the monsters,” he added. “It’s always the monsters’ point of view.”
