Monsters, Inc./Headscratchers

What happens if you're inside the closet when they open their portal?

You're able to walk through the portal without effect, most likely.
You get the plot of the movie.
You'd see the door open itself, but the monster world would be behind it. Ironically, the monster in your room can't get you.
- I assumed that if you opened the door, you'd get into the monster world, just that you'd be coming out the back since the front is being used by the monsters to get into your room.
Most likely if the closet door on the other side is already open you can't make the portal on either one.

If the doors need power to operate but provide the power for the monster world, then how did they start working in the first place?

Simple: The doors were originally powered by generators that ran on some sort of conventional fuel. Once scream was discovered, it took over from the previous power source.
There was a DVD special feature that explained this. Monsters used to travel to human lands by conventional means to gather screams, but this was dangerous, so the Waternoose famnily innovated a safer way to gather screams.

In the monster world, what happens if you go open the other side of those closet portal things?

It would form a portal, which can only be entered on the other side.
You'd end up inside the closet. Have you ever played Prey? Same concept.
- p.s. sphincter
You can't. Doors only open in one direction, toward their hinges.
- I think what he means is like being inside a room and going out versus being outside a room and going in. It's all relative to what side of the door you are on.
From the back it would just work like an empty doorway. The portal only works when entered through the front.
- Does that mean that if you stuck your hand through, then pulled it back, you would lose your hand through the portal?

If Boo is revealed to be scared of Sully, why didn't he just scare her off earlier?

She wasn't "revealed to be scared". She became frightened when he roared in front of her.

It's not clear who really believes that children are as poisonous as is (mistakenly) thought.

Waternoose seems to react with fear at Boo, but has no qualms picking her up later. Also, he's the head of the conspiracy to capture kids, so he must know they're ok. Meanwhile, Roz, the head of the Child Detection Agency, also seems to know that kids aren't poisonous, in which case what's the point of the CDA?

Their entire economy/energy policy is based on terrifying helpless children. Since the monsters aren't evil by nature, the only way to make them accept it is to demonize the kids.
- In which case, why are the CDA so vigilant? They really *seem* to think the kids are poisonous.
- They may actually believe it. They are just the foot soldiers of the conspiracy.
- And yet a whole bunch of them watch their leader let one be held by a monster with no apparent problems, and then let the child go home.
Waternoose is startled because he's thinking "Oh great, James and his friend have the child. They may very well be on to my plot. I'll have to think fast and get rid of them." The CDA likely exists and perpetuates the myth of children being toxic for the purpose of keeping anyone from thinking along Randall's and Waternoose's line, namely "Let's kidnap children wholesale and suck the life out of them to get all the power we'll ever need," on the basis of ethics and/or fear of the monster world being compromised.
Roz probably discovered children weren't poisonous while she was working undercover, but they couldn't share that information with everyone in the CDA in the middle of an ongoing investigation. So the decontamination teams and such would continue to do their job.
... but the fact that they were investigating a plot to kidnap children supports the Epileptic Tree that their true job is to protect kids and maintain the Masquerade from humans.
Perhaps children to them are like peanuts are to us, innocuous to much of the population, but toxic to enough of them that the government gets involved
- If peanuts were as tightly controlled and restricted as children are in this movie, I'd have a much harder time finding them.
The CDA exists because, while they aren't poisonous, they are dangerous. Boo laughing causes a power surge. They have to be prevented from coming into the monster world because they mess with the power grid. The whole "poison" thing is probably just a scare tactic to make people take them seriously.
I thought it was just a cultural misunderstanding. If I remember correctly, every monster except Sully has shown incredible fear of Boo until they were around her long enough to realize she wasn't dangerous.
Odds are the Children Are Poisonous myth was started by the original Waternoose founders of the Monster's Inc. factory. They found a way into the human world and realized that children's screams can be used for power. This is a good thing, and since the monsters aren't actually evil they create a way to use the power without putting the children in any actual danger. Think about it, if the children weren't believed to be deadly how long do you think it would be before people started doing exactly what happened in the movie? All they'd have to do is kidnap children and terrify them until they were useless, which would be far more effective than using scarers, but it's also horribly unethical. Nobody who finds out about the kidnapping children plan approves of it, from Sully and Mike, to Roz and the CDA to even Celia, who went from being incredibly angry at Mike to defending him when she learns the truth.
I thought that the myth was only related to direct contact with the child or the child's possessions.

When Sully scares a slumber party and fills up several canisters one after the other, each canister appears attached to the scream intake valve by magic as the last is removed.

Mike is just that fast.
- Hey, someone had to teach Guido how to change tires...
Indeed, if you watch it frame-by-frame, he grabs new empties from behind where he's putting the full ones, from the camera's point of view. It does stretch credulity to be so fast, but if for one joke and he has to do this all day and has had years of practice.
When i first watched the movie, i took that as an explanation why Mike was Sulley's, the best among the scarers, workmate: Mike is the best there is at his part of the job.

Why do they need a silent countdown into the start of the scaring session, if they then start it with the blow of a horn?

They don't actually need it; it's just a spoof of the old Show Within a Show live-television trope where the stage director/manager/whathaveyou bosses everyone around in a moaning tone of pseudo-New-York-ese and does the countdown to and from commercial breaks. They usually end up having a nervous breakdown when people rush onto set to declare their love for an actor, or to reveal the truth behind some huge plot, etc. while they're on the air (Um... Do We Have This One? ?). The best reasons I can think of for this story to have it are
- a) to make scaring seem even more like showbusiness (in addition to the rivalries between the scarers, the hero-worship they receive, and the fact that their job is essentially to leave an impression on people who scare the pants off them just by being there), and, by doing this, to
- b) help in a minor capacity to set us up for the story's conclusion; yeah, the 'window of innocence' shrinks every year, but no one really outgrows a fart joke.
To give the monsters time to prepare/steel themselves for the blow of the horn.

Laughter

The heroes are presented as being so smart and so clever...yet it takes them so very, very long to realize kids laughing makes more power than screams. They see it happen a million times. They -use- it to escape the bad guys.

Monsters are terrified of kids, and vice versa. Coaxing laughter out of a child would require extensive interaction with one, which as far as the monsters knew could be fatal. And Mike and Sully were too terrified of being caught or killed to make the connection at the time.
This troper loves the movie, but would hesitate to call either Mike or Sully "smart" or "clever". The only really clever folks in the movie were Roz and Waternoose...
- And, arguably, Randall.

Stranding

Waternoose strands monsters at the top of mountain... at the bottom is a village of children's doors. If I was going to strand someone on say, a deserted island, I'd make darn sure it isn't in swimming distance of say, a manned weather station.

Keep in mind that the remote village was a three-day hike down a mountain for the Abominable Snowman anyway, through heavy snow and ice. Going out in a blizzard really is very dangerous and they can last for days, weeks on end in the mountains. Sulley and Mike were incredibly lucky not to get killed.
You've just been exiled - presumably your property has been sold, you've shamed yourself and your family, nobody in their right minds would employ you, you'll probably be thrown straight back even if you can find a way - and your only chances of getting back are rarely-activated portal-doors 'guarded' by killer humans.
Probably monsters HAVE tried to get back - like busting out of prison.

Sushi

Much of the plot happened at a sushi restaurant. Many of the monsters LOOK like fish. Creepy. "Hey, Bob, wanna go eat at the Humanoid Steak Emporioum? Half off arm-fillets."

So what, is there no such thing as a predatory fish? I do believe Pixar's very next film validates that there are. Besides, technically sushi doesn't refer to the fish. It refers to the vinegared rice which the fish is placed upon. Many sushi dishes don't even have fish (instead having meat, vegetables or nothing). The word "sushi" actually derives from an archaic term that roughly translates as "it's sour".
You eat cows, well you probably do, I'm guessing. Anyway, cows are mammals, and you're a mammal. Is eating a cow cannibalism? Nope. Also, eagles eat chickens, and gators eat small snakes.
- Exactly, I'm a Humanitarian. In fact, I bet we'd all be humanitarians too if we didn't know what we were eating.
  - Apparently you don't, as sushi are made mostly of rice and seaweed.

Power Crisis

Kids are getting less easily scared earlier in life, but more and more kids have been born every year. It implies that the monsters stopped caring about power efficiency a few years ago (almost a metaphor for gasoline in the '50s-'60s than for oil to renewable power switching), rather than the increase in utilities and decrease in scream power meeting in a shortage.

There's a limited number of "scarers", though. It doesn't matter if there's 50 or 100 kids who can be scared if you can only go through 25 doors a night.

So what keeps Randall from coming back?

He was never officially banished, Mike and Sully threw him into the real world before they told the CDA what they'd found out. If the two of them were able to find a closet in Nepal, it shouldn't be too difficult for him to find another one in what looked like the southern US.

Nothing technically is stopping him. But he doesn't know kids aren't deadly. He probably doesn't dare to search for a door back. In any case he doesn't have a whole lot to come back to, aware that he'll probably be exiled officially for his crimes, or sent to prison. Maybe he just chooses exile over prison.

How old is Boo?

Word of God puts her at two.

Umm... so what exactly DOES happen when Sully opens the door and reunites with Boo?

Seriously, this bugs me. Can they just make a Monsters Inc. 2 to satisfy my need that I've had since I was, like, nine?

He opens the door and reunites with Boo. Presumably they remain friends. What else do you need? The movie has to end at some point, after all. You can't show every detail of everyone's interactions.
It's left to our imagination. About a year has passed (according to Sulley's graph) and Boo is still a baby.

Why destroy a door when it's deemed "dead?" Why not put it on hold until a new family (and potentially a new child) moves into that house? Seems like a waste of a door. Where do new doors come from, for that matter?

Maybe they thought it was too much of a risk. Would you walk into a cave that you knew belonged to a dangerous wild animal that could kill a human on the off chance that it wouldn't be there anymore? As for new doors, they come from wherever all the old doors come from.
Maybe it's to keep down on storage. Those doors could be unusable for years on end.

Regarding The Big Board...

If all the other scarers have their surnames on The Big Board, why does Randall's slot say "Randall" rather than "Boggs"?
- Maybe that's the name he prefers to be known by? YMMV but this troper thinks "Boggs" sounds weird and undignified compared to "Randall".

What's with the Elizabethan collars?

Most of the CDA's actions would make some sort of sense if kids really were toxic, but what's the point of the Elizabethan collars they keep attaching to everyone?

Uh. Those aren't Elizabethan collars. They're collars like the vet puts on a dog when they don't want the dog to bite their stitches or something. Or, you know, the Cone of Shame.
- Which are referred to as Elizabethan Collars... As to why, they're probably Rule of Funny. They look silly.

What happens if during the day a kid switches rooms with an adult

People move house and redecorate/change the format of the rooms all the time. Do the Monsters have a way to pick up on this, or something?

Simple. They make periodic checks. And they do it during the night when everyone in the house is asleep. If they find the family has moved out and a childless couple has moved in, they put the door into storage and check it again every few years to see if the couple has either had a kid or moved out.
It takes more than a day to switch to sleeping in another room. If the room is unusable it would be picked up on pretty quickly. The door would either be shredded or put into storage.

The Purple Monster that puts in his eyes.

When he walks out with Sully and the other scarers in heroic slow-mo, he has 3 or 4 eyes. However, when he's in his station, he has NO EYES and his little helper dude PUTS IN a dozen or so eyes. Later, I think he's seen with a few eyes as well. Continuity, much?

Obviously he chooses how many eyes he feels like wearing at that moment. Perhaps he's most comfortable with only 3 or 4, but he know that a dozen is more effective for scaring, so he adds more when it's to get some screams.
Two different monsters, just look at the score board carefully
Yes, this confused me for the longest time, but there are two different monsters. Both purple, same size and shape. The only difference is one has 3 eyes, and the other has none until he adds them.

Concerning Banishment

Let's see... Loch Ness Monster, Abominable Snowman, Bigfoot... Mike and Sully? Something seems off.

But Mike and Sully were banished for trying to uncover Randall's (well, really Waternoose's, but they didn't know it at the time) conspiracy. And who knows why the others were banished. I mean, the Abominable Snowman is a pretty nice guy, we don't know why he got banished. For all we know, he stumbled upon the truth as well.
Maybe those names were given by humans who spotted them. Mike and Sully had just been banished, so no one had time to name them. Although that doesn't explain how Mike knew those names.
- Those legends have existed for a very long time. Possibly they tried to get back. Nicknames possibly.

What about non-hinged closet doors?

This troper has only ever lived in houses with two-part sliding closet doors. Are kids with those kinds of doors just automatically safe? Do they have another method for getting to them?

Well, Mike knows how a sliding door works, so it can be assume they can enter kids rooms through those.
Is it really that hard to figure out a sliding door, though?
And they could just have sliding doors in the monster world on buildings so that's why he knows how to use one. Personally I think if they don't have a normal door they can't get in.

Why is there a door in the middle of the Himalaya's?

To banish people through, obviously.

All Those Activated Doors

When Boo laughed during the big escape scene, thousands upon thousands of doors activated for closets all over the world. What are the chances that not a single one was opened from the other side revealing the monster world to whomever opened the door? I cringe at the thought of the number of children who opened their closet doors, stumbled through and fell hundreds of feet to their deaths on the warehouse floor.

Time Passing

At least 24 hours pass in the Monster World while Boo is there. And time seems to pass in the Monster World while Sulley and Mike are in the Human World. Surely Boo's parents notice she's missing? She's a two-year-old girl, and she just... vanished from her room late at night. They'd go frantic. How come nobody ever touches on this?

The story's from the monsters' perspective, so cutting to Boo's parents would have broken the narrative flow.
The Monster World is on a separate planet (or possibly moon) which rotates at a much faster pace than Earth-possibly only a few Earth hours could equal a single day on the small Monsterian planet/moon. The company has only been in the family for three generations. Given that Mr. Waternoose is most likely quite old (the lifespan of his species of monster is possibly one of extended longevity), this could date the factory back around over a hundred Earth years. How did they connect the planets? During Tesla's experimentation with radio waves, the planet/moon caught the stray waves and have researched closer into it before figuring out the presence of life on Earth. Then they sent a monster with invisibility and camouflage capabilities onto the planet for closer research. This would mean Boo was gone on Earth for not as long as one would suspect. To fit with the Eastern Seaboard to Nepal time transition (ten hour time difference for those too lazy to count), they could put the said daughter to bed at 7pm and have her returned by 5am or 6am. Boo's room was not intensely ruffled as expected. Knowing parents, if they had been awake during the periods of her disappearance, stuff would be thrown across the room and bedsheets would be on the floor. Maybe have a few police investigators sprawled within the room. This would also explain why humanity is rather mysterious and frightening to them - they know much about it as we do about the new flu of the day. It can also explain why Randall, a creature who can both camouflage and disappear, is so concerned about being on top. He's self conscious about his ancestor's great contribution to the development of modern technology (and why he was able to build a machine with assistance only from Boggs and whatever Waternoose provided. he apparently has inherited the ability to create machinery). Also, it would explain the similarities between human and monster cities, or why monsters have cars even though there is extreme separation...am I reading too far into this?
- ...Um, yes? The WMG history lesson didn't really have much to do with the "their world has shorter days than the human world" answer embedded within it.
- Or it could just be like the relationship between Earth time and Narnian time. In the Chronicles of Narnia books Lucy and her siblings spend part of their lives in Narnia until some time after they become adults and when they come back to our world they come back at the same time they left. Another example is when Lucy is playing hide and seek with her siblings and hides in the wardrobe while Peter counts (he's in the 90's by this point). That wardrobe leads to her spending part of the night in Narnia and when she comes back to our world Peter hasn't finished counting. Basically when someone goes into Narnia and then comes back it's almost like their life was put on pause. I hope this also answers your question.

Mike and Sulley possible name references

Is there any Word of God as to Mike and Sulley being named after "Mike" (Quinn) and Sully from Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman? I haven't been able to find anything on it (granted, I didn't look very hard), but for some reason it seems to strike me as a reference more than a coincidence.

Stinky deodorant

In the monster universe the monsters do not appear to scare by using tactics regarding hygiene. They seem quite clean and tidy (there is a scene in which Sulley brushes his teeth). However, the one moment that does not fit with this profile is the locker room scene, in which Mike and Sulley mention several deodorant "aromas", all of typically foul smells. For a society that appears to be quite clean, the filthy deodorants seem somewhat out of place.

- Nothing says something that smells nasty can't be actually clean.
- It's the Monsters' equivalent of the durian. It smells like a rotten onion, but a lot of people love it with an undying passion. It's also really healthy to eat.
- They should have had durian cologne, that would have been cool.