Have you heard about the Pixar Theory that this guy apaprently spent a year working on? It essentially explains, in detail, how all of Pixar’s movies are in the same universe, but different time lines. Some people are describing it as a thesis, so, like any good thesis will receive, I’m going to do a bit of challenging. (btw, you can see the original post http://jonnegroni.com/2013/07/11/the-pixar-theory/).
What caught my eye the most was the reference to Boo from Monsters Inc. Easily my favorite Pixar character, the theory is that Monsters Inc. is based in the future from Boo’s timeline – so the monsters are the reclaiming of society after humans meet an end of days kind of thing, and they go in the past to harvest human children’s screams much like we harvest dinosaur remains to make fuel.
It COULD fit, because, honestly, we don’t see much of the human world in Monsters Inc. Plus, having any inkling of knowledge that humans destroyed their own existence would easily lead a monster population to fear all humans. After all, do we ever see much of anything that relates a specific time frame to the human world? We assume the monsters live in a parallel universe that is in a linear time to our own, but there’s no evidence to fully support the timeframe that the humans are living in.
But here’s what we do see: at the end of Monster’s Inc, Boo, who never is given a real name, but I have seen referred to as Mary in several published texts (remember when they used to make all those books giving the 4-1-1 of all the different comic characters and their universes? There was a Monsters Inc. one that called her Mary too.), goes home and we see some toys in the background. One of those toys is Jesse, the cowgirl counterpart to Woody in Toy Story. She also has a Nemo fish toy, even though that movie released two years after Monsters Inc.
Now hang in here with me for a minute. In Toy Story 3, as you can see in the photo here, there is a little girl at Sunnyside that looks a lot like Boo. Too much, in fact, to call it a coincidence. Pixar loves Easter Eggs, and to me, there is no doubt in my mind that this is one of them, and gives us enough to go on to assume that Bonnie (the young girl from Toy Story 3 who received the toys at the end) and Boo are friends.
When Monsters Inc. concludes, we have Sully opening Boo’s repaired door – the end. What we don’t get is a clear idea of how much time has passed between the door being shredded and reconstructed. It was enough time for Sully to take over the energy plant and for Mike to rebuild the door from splinters. But was that months? Years? I assume it couldn’t have been a large amount of time, because when Sully takes Boo home, there’s a drawing on her art easel that is now on the wall when Sully peaks his head through the door. I mean, everyone is different, but I probably wouldn’t save a drawing like that for years on end. All the same though, we don’t get to see Boo when Sully re-enters, so it’s a question that’s bothered me for the last twelve years. And when I thought we finally got a sequel – boo, it’s a pre-quel without Boo!
Looking at the situation realistically, Sully probably came back to say goodbye to Boo again. He may have popped in on her from time to time, but we know they’re from two different spaces, making they’re platonic relationship is star crossed. So, going back to the Pixar Theory that’s linked to above, where does that leave Boo? The theory proposes that Boo saw into the future due to following Sully, she knew that doors were the key to Sully, and believed that Sully was a cat, which gave her the motivation to master time travel and become obsessed with animals having human traits – making her the Witch in Brave. As far fetched as this seems, it’s not a bad angle when you think about it. After all, we saw a Nemo toy appear in Monsters Inc. in 2001 – Finding Nemo was released in 2003. So Pixar has a grand plan that we don’t always see. Maybe in 2015 we’ll get a film from Pixar about time travel that would solidify the gaps in the Boo theory.
But, I would like to take this a bit farther. Lets say Boo is the little girl at Sunnyside Daycare, and she grows up to master time travel – even though we don’t know how yet. What if Boo grew up with Bonnie, admiring Woody for years (since she owns her own Jesse – or maybe borrowed Bonnie’s?). Now, Boo learns how to time travel as an adult, and maybe she can’t find Sully, or maybe she has different goals for time travel now and thinks that Sully was an imaginary friend as an adult. Maybe she wants to go back in time and prove to everyone that Sully was real, or perhaps she wants to go back to the happiest time of her life. In any scenario, Boo could end up – with time travel – as an adult living in the years that she was a child (just to help any confused readers: say Boo grew up in 2000, invented time travel in 2030, and went back in time to 2000 as an adult). Maybe she gets trapped in that time and, by the time she’s gotten back to 2030 and has the technology to reinvent time travel, perhaps she goes all the way to the time of Brave and is in that timeline a few decades before Merida comes around. AND, after so many years of pining for her “kitty,” she reflects, or sneaks a peak at Sully again, and realizes that he looks more like a bear (which he does, based on shape and size). That explains the Witch’s obsession with bears, and why there’s a little carving of Sully in the background. A witch turning people into bears either because she’s bitter about her loss of Sully, or because she hopes to recreate him – it fits!
Another idea: Perhaps a young adult Boo is involved with time travel and wants to test it out by going back and finding a new Woody doll. We know in Toy Story 2 that the Prospector said their show and toy line was huge until the moon landing in 1969. Then everyone only wanted space toys. But, while Boo’s going back in time, the machine breaks, or possibly malfunctions and only takes her a few years into the future, stranding Boo in the 1970s or 80s. No one knows what time she’s in, and the technology was new, so there’s no one coming to rescue her. She copes with that, and eventually settles in and has a life, including children, her oldest of which was given the Woody doll she went back in time for. Boo could have been Andy’s mom, and then, once her kids were grown and time travel was possible, she could have split to the Dark Ages, where she makes replicas of the Pizza Planet truck while thinking about when her kids were young.
We do hear Andy’s Mom in Toy Story 2 tell Al (from Al’s Toy Barn) that she can’t part with Woody because it’s an old family toy. She knew it was one of her son’s favorite toys, sure, but Andy was 8 when Toy Story released in 1995 – making him assumedly born in 1987, 18 years after the productions of Woody’s Round Up ceased. Even if we assume that mom was a very young mother at is 30 during Toy Story 2 – that would have left her at age 12 when the production of Woody stopped – and it’s unlikely that a 12 year old girl wanted a cowboy doll. So how did Woody come to be in that family and why did he mean so much to Andy’s mom when Wheezy sure didn’t? Could Woody have even been a gift from Bonnie right before Boo was going to time travel?
Boo had a Jesse doll as a child, we know that’s a fact. But when Jesse and Bullseye magically show up in Andy’s room, we never get any reaction from the mother. She’s clearly a single mom, we get no hints that there are any gift-giving visitors going to Andy’s house, and Andy’s mom is VERY aware of how old and rare Woody is. Why did she never question where Jesse came from? Was it because Jesse was already a familiar friend to mom?
Or, maybe Boo never got stuck in time. Maybe she fell in love with an era or a person and just chose to stay there, but pops in and out of time as she pleases. The Witch in Brave may be sitting at a family dinner in 2013 at Thanksgiving, and visiting Bonnie for Xmas in 2040. But we do hear a hint of love that Andy’s Mom gives towards Bonnie, even though Bonnie is much younger than either of Andy’s Mom’s children. Andy barely even questions it when his mom tells him to take the toys to Bonnie’s house. The families know each other well, even though it’s left up to the imagination to guess why that is.
More ideas still: If that is not Boo at Sunnyside – what if Boo was also Emily from Toy Story 2 that abandoned Jesse? Similarly, the girl at Sunnyside could have been Boo’s daughter, or great-granddaughter. Or, what if Boo is Andy’s daughter, and, by that time, Bonnie has grown out of her toys and gives the special ones to Boo? Then Andy kept the toys in a safe place until his daughter got bigger, but she loved Jesse and kept snatching her away. We have no solid proof of the Pixar timeline IF all of the films are in the same universe, so it is all speculative, even though it all seems very intertwined. But, there is something hauntingly special about the Witch in Brave having Sully art in her home, and we get little hints in Brave and Monsters Inc that the two movies are connected to Toy Story somehow.
Now, I’d also like to look at the Pixar Theory and potentially answer a question raised – if Monsters Inc is in the future, after WALL-E took place, then what happened to the machines and humans again? We don’t see any living machines like WALL-E in Monsters Inc, and there are no people living with the monsters. But we know that Pixar is a great fan of Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and many other films), and I believe it was Miyazaki that worked on a story that involved humans living underground after polluting the world too much, and as the world healed itself, the human population could not survive in the fresh air any longer. Taking that into account, what if the humans started to clean up the Earth, but just laid the foundation and died out? After being stationary and breathing manufactured space air for 800 years, that’s going to be a near impossible adjustment. There’s even a moment in WALL-E where they show that being in space will mess with how human’s bones grow. So, it’s a safe assumption that humans returned to Earth with grand intentions, but were too far adapted to space life to change anything. Then there would be no one to to maintain the machines, and they couldn’t be able to maintain themselves because the world had been cleaned up just enough that finding pieces and parts of machinery (and ones that worked to your mechanical specifications) was no longer possible. It gives way for something else to adapt and take over the Earth – which could be “monsters” or mutated/evolved animals.
Trying to Mom 