Pixar animators had to follow a toddler around the studio with a microphone to record the voice of Boo in Monsters Inc, because trying to make a real three-year-old read from a script is mathematically impossible.

A closer look

Pixar animators had to follow a toddler around the studio with a microphone to record the voice of Boo in Monsters Inc, because trying to make a real three-year-old read from a script is mathematically impossible. Mary Gibbs, the daughter of a story artist, simply ran around the office playing with toys while the audio crew frantically chased her to capture her authentic giggles, babbles, and random shrieks. They basically turned child containment into an extreme sport, piecing together a coherent emotional performance from hours of unstructured toddler chaos. Modern voice acting usually involves isolated booths and highly trained professionals, but creating the emotional core of a beloved Pixar masterpiece required a boom operator to army-crawl under a desk just to record a kid eating crackers