In the past 30 years, Pixar Animation Studios has completely redefined our perceptions of animation. Not only that, but they helped to completely redefine the approach to storytelling in animated features.
However, many aspects of their story remain largely untold or unknown.
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See how your Pixar knowledge measures up and check out these 10+ obscure Pixar facts fans might not know!
All of the films are connected.
There’s an incredibly in-depth website that explains everything in excruciating detail, beginning with Merida in Brave . The theory adds an even greater underlying element of enjoyability to the films.
There are exactly 20,622 balloons attached to Carl’s house in *Up*.
In reality, it would have taken anywhere from 100,000 balloons, upwards to as much as 23.5 million !
I’d hate to see how red in the face you’d be after a session like that!
Mary Gibbs, the voice actor for Boo in *Monsters Inc.*, was the daughter of one of the production team members.
“Normally they have adults do kids voices, but since it was my dad’s work and I was comfortable around everyone. they ended up using my voice for the actual movie.”
The success of *Finding Nemo* nearly resulted in Clown Fish becoming locally extinct.
“There’s nothing wrong with owning a marine fish in an aquarium but I think a lot of people didn’t realise 90 percent of clown fish sold are taken from the wild,” said Ph.D. candidate Carmen da Silva in an interview with the Huffington Post.
The animation work for *Toy Story 2* was accidentally deleted.
The movie almost never saw the light of day!
Luckily, a member of the team had a backup file on her home computer and was able to restore the film.
John Ratzenberger has leant his voice to a character in every single Pixar film.
Most memorably, you’ll recall Ratzenberger as Hamm in the Toy Story franchise.
Listen closely though and you’ll hear his unmistakable voice in every successive film since.
*Cars* sold an absolutely insane amount of merchandise.
In the five years after the film’s initial release, Disney is reported to have sold more than $10 billion dollars worth of merchandise.
Do you know how many Lightning McQueen lunchpails you have to sell to reach $10 billion dollars?!
In order to help set their films apart, Pixar came up with a secret set of rules.
These included things like: “no songs, no “I want” moments, no happy village, no love story,” and perhaps most impressively “No villain.”
Essentially what Pixar did was defy every single accepted custom for animated filmmaking at the time.
Eve from *Wall-E* has real-world design inspiration built right in.
If the sleek Eve bot looked at all familiar, that’s probably because she was created by Jonathan Ives : Apple’s Chief Designer.
She does kind of look like a Mac Book in the right light, don’t you think?
At one point, there was a plan for Disney to start selling *Ratatouille* themed wine.
This was quickly scrapped. Disney was worried about the mixed messages that could be sent by using a beloved kids cartoon to promote alcohol sales.
Probably a smart choice in the end.
*Wall-E* was named after the founder of Disney.
Walter Elias Disney is the given name for the sire of the Magic Kingdom.
Wall-E is also an acronym that stands for “Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth Class.”
Woody in *Toy Story* wasn’t originally going to be a cowboy.
The early drafts of the script portrayed Woody as a ventriloquist’s dummy . Which would have just been way too creepy.
Did you ever read Goosebumps as a kid? Remember Slappy from Night of the Living Dummy ? Terrifying.
A113 is in every single Pixar movie that’s ever been made.
Supposedly, it’s a nod to Room A113 at the California Institution of Arts.
This was essentially the birthplace of Pixar and where several of their animators began their careers.
Pixar execs changed the ending of *Finding Dory* after watching a documentary.
It was called Blackfish . The new ending made it clear that the inhabitants of the marine park were free to leave their enclosure at any time.
Blackfish is a documentary that helped bring the inhuman practices of Seaworld and other marine parks to the surface.
Reese Witherspoon was originally cast as Merida in *Brave* but had to quit the film because her accent was so bad.
Reese talks about the rather embarrassing turn of events in an interview.
She also reveals that her secret talent is hip-hop dancing.
