Dean Hardscrabble was initially conceived as a man — but it was a nasty, giant centipede that finally made her a lady.
Via: Disney•Pixar
In Disney-Pixar's Monsters University, the titular institution's School of Scaring is overseen by an imperious and imposing figure named Dean Hardscrabble. Pictured above (at the far right), Hardscrabble is particularly hard on MU freshman Mike Wazowski (voiced by Billy Crystal), and their confrontation ultimately affects the lives of both Mike and his (eventual) best friend, Sulley (voiced by John Goodman).
For a character this consequential, director Don Scanlon and his team spent a full year working on the design, including creating full, physical, three-dimensional models, and the complex CG "rigging" of how the character would move through space.
This is what Dean Hardscrabble looked like when they were done:
Via: Disney•Pixar
Four weeks before the movie was set to transition into physical production — meaning all designs had to be finished and locked into place so the animation team could begin working with them — Scanlon realized Hardscrabble needed to be a woman instead.
"Dan likes to play things against type," says Jason Deamer, the distractingly handsome art director for Monster University's character design. "He felt a male dean as an antagonist [in a college movie] was just well-trod territory, and it would just be more interesting and different to do a female version." The fact that the character had changed within the story itself also contributed to the decision. "He used to just be a professor, and then became the dean, the most powerful character in the school," says Daniela Strijleva, the distractingly beautiful character artist for Hardscrabble. (Oh the irony of people this gorgeous spending their days creating monsters!) "If you look at the alligator version of Hardscrabble, he had a lot of power — like sheer power, just physically. That's what a lot of the jocks [and] Sulley already have. I think that they wanted to achieve something a little more subtle [with the character]." (It's also worth noting that, had Hardscrabble not become a woman, the film would have had zero major female characters.)
A 16-year Pixar veteran, Deamer is well aware of the studio's long history of tearing up a well-developed idea that isn't working and starting over, even as hard deadlines loom precariously overhead. But still, how did he and his team feel about scrapping work on they'd already spent a year on?
"We were not exactly initially thrilled," he says. At first, they even tried to save their original design by feminizing it, but that fell flat quickly. "It was like lipstick on a pig, a little bit. Just didn't quite work out. We realized that we needed to go back to the drawing board."
And they did — with just four weeks left to do a year's worth of work.
