No Boo in Monsters University

Impress your friends! Wow strangers on the bus! Be the toast of any dinner party! All with the help of thirty four fairly geeky facts we've gleaned about new Pixar release, Monsters University...

1. Director Dan Scanlon has one line in the film, playing an improv student who tries to recruit Mike for the drama society at the MU freshers’ fair.

2. When designing the look of First Grade and university-age Mike, the character design team researched the ways young frogs differ in appearance to adult amphibians. His skin is thus clearer, brighter, and more elastic.

3. The sound-effect for Sully’s major roar towards the end of the film was made using a blend of tiger, bear, and human.

4. Back when Monsters University was a Circle 7 Disney project, it was reportedly going to be a sequel titled “Monsters Inc. 2: Lost in Scaradise”. The premise was rumoured to have found Mike and Sulley trapped in the human world and searching for Boo after discovering that her family had moved house, an idea with more than a touch of Toy Story about it.

5. The character Helen Mirren voices, Dean Hardscrabble, was originally designed to be male, but switched gender to redress the balance of there being no major female Scarers in the original film.

6. The Pixar team kept an Amazonian giant centipede - the creature on which Dean Hardscrabble's bottom half was based - on hand during her character development. Only when a dangerous insects specialist visited the campus and warned the designers about the toxicity of its venom was the creature transferred from its loosely-sealed plastic box to a proper tank.

7. Mike Wasowski’s parents were originally developed as characters for Monsters University, and Billy Crystal was to have provided the voices, but the couple was dropped to simplify the story and make Mike’s character seem more up against it arriving at college without comforting parental support.

8. While the film was in production, to continue the college theme, the Pixar team went through friendly university-style fraternity ‘hazings’, or initiation tests organised by department heads. The playful humiliations ranged from cross-dressing as Mrs Doubtfire to one employee having to carry around a cardboard cut-out hunk and introduce it to everyone she met as her boyfriend.

9. Amongst the many iterations of the film during development was 'Monsters Elementary', a version of the story in which Mike and Sulley meet as young children, then separate and reunite at university.

10. The address on mature student Don’s business card is shown as 1200 Dark Avenue, a reference to the address of Pixar’s Emeryville campus, which is located at 1200 Park Avenue.

11. The texture for Oozma Kappa fraternity character Squishy, designed to represent undeclared students unsure of what they’re going to become and with no clear identity, was based on Japanese Mochi sweets. Eating sushi one mealtime, the character designers brought a glutinous rice sweet back to the texture artists as inspiration.

12. There are an average of 3.7 eyes per monster character on campus.

13. The monster designers delineated 6 basic species of monster, then made them distinctive with the addition of limbs, horns, eyes, and wings.

14. There are well over 400 characters in the film, and an average of 25 in each shot, making it Pixar’s most populated picture to date.