The more focus on humans a Pixar movie has, the more exaggerated the human characters’ designs are.
Like, these are the human characters in the movies that focused primarily on non-human characters like monsters, toys, fish, and personifications of emotions. They’re not 100% realistic, but they have reasonable sizes and proportions.
Meanwhile, the movies that put more emphasis on its human cast have more exaggerated features (Ratatouille has way more human characters than rat characters, and the story puts a considerable emphasis on them). There’s also more body diversity, but that could be due to the larger number of human characters.
The only exception is Wall-E, but the humans were meant to be cartoonishly large in size.
While the “ordinary” humans in that movie were literally depicted by live-action people.
It’s an interesting way to play with audience perspective and empathy. The more human-centric movies have human designs that are based more on emotions rather than realism. We see them more as “people” rather than just “humans”.
Ooh another thing I noticed: This also applies to their environment design. Here’s what the Monster World in Monsters University looks like:
And here’s how the human world looks in that same movie:
Everything feels so deliberate and exaggerated in the monster world, while the human world is more grounded and natural.
