One of my favorite Pixar movies is Monsters Inc. The 2001 animated film starring John Goodman as Sully, and Billy Crystal as Mike Wazowski, was ranked number 1 in the box office during the first week. Now, if you haven’t seen Monsters Inc., first of all, you broke my heart. Secondly, watch the movie before I spoil the movie for you. So major spoiler announcement! Now onto the movie’s hidden Easter eggs:
The first Easter egg you most likely missed was the meaning to “2319.” If you think of the alphabet, each letter has a number. So the letter “A” is the first number, “B” is the second. “23” relates to the letter “W” and “19” is related to the letter “S”. Now, what does a W and an S have to do with the movie? Two words: White Sock. The phrase “2319” is used when Samuel, the orange fuzzy monster, comes in contact with a human sock, a white sock. The phrase is even yelled two more times after that when Samuel has, yet again, a white sock on him. However, don’t confuse “2319” with “A113”, which is the running gag throughout all Pixar movies. This brings me to the next category of hidden Easter eggs throughout the movie.
Pixar does a great job of sneaking references to either past or future Pixar movies. Throughout Monsters Inc., they referenced Toy Story (1995), A Bug’s Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Finding Nemo (2003), and of course, the Pixar ball. To be more specific, when Sully first goes into Boo’s room to bring her back, she hands him a Jessie doll and a plush Nemo. Even before she hands off her toys, you can see the recognizable Pixar ball on the ground. Another example is when the main antagonist, Randall, is thrown through a door into the human world and left to fend for himself. At that time, we see the same trailer from A Bug’s Life, and we see the Pizza Planet truck from Toy Story next to the trailer.
I could go on about all the Pixar references through Monsters Inc., but there is one more secret that I am sure you missed.
When Boo enters the monster universe and Sully takes her into his apartment to hide out, she draws a couple of pictures, including a picture of her monster, which happens to be Randall. However, before she picks up the photo of Randall, you can briefly see that on another drawing, she puts her name on the top, which happens to be Mary. In real life, the voice actor for Boo was Mary Gibbs, the daughter of Rob Gibbs, one of the artists for the film.
Now, I know I threw a lot at you, and I apologize if I ruined a little bit of your childhood. There are so many other references I could tell you about, but I know some of them would be only known by absolute Disney geeks, like the references to old Disneyland attractions or to the production team on the movie. That will be for another day. I hope you somewhat enjoyed diving deeper into a classic movie, and just keep an open eye while watching Disney movies, especially Pixar.