It's easy to assume that CGI is less work than traditional animation, and to an extent, that's true. But that doesn't mean it's a walk in the park either. Computer animators may not have to redraw every character in every frame, but designing and modeling them is still a long process. So let's be forgiving if they don't restart that process for every background extra and just add some new colors or textures instead. As soon as you start to notice the recycling, though, it's hard to ignore it. The crowd at Harryhausen's looks near-identical to the one at the factory, to start with. The animators seem to have been especially fond of a few monsters in particular. The long-legged critter the scare board identifies as Schmidt appears sitting on the curb on Mike and Sulley's walk to work and again as one of the interviewees after Boo's "rampage."
Rivera, the skinny, tentacled monster is at least as prolific. He hides behind a mustache to play the grocer and changes color from orange to purple to play the waiter at Harryhausen's. And then there's an unnamed model we'll call the three-eyed, one-horned, yellow (sometimes green, sometimes flying) people-eater. Just for starters, he appears as one of the students in the opening simulation, several times in the news report, and a more compact version is in the daycare group Boo wanders into. The pink-and-purple-spotted, blonde-haired monster watching the kids shows up elsewhere too, including in the Monsters Inc. commercial and as a Harryhausen's patron who Boo photobombs. We're starting to wonder if Monstropolis really has enough population to qualify as a metropolis, or if only a couple dozen monsters live in the whole town.
