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Plot summary
Susan Murphy, who lives in Modesto, California, is about to marry Derek Dietl, a weatherman who has moved their honeymoon from Paris to Fresno for a career opportunity. Before the ceremony, a meteorite strikes her, and the energy she absorbs makes her grow during the wedding. The military tranquilizes and captures her, then locks her in a secret government compound for monsters, under General W.R. Monger. There she meets Dr. Cockroach Ph.D., B.O.B., the Missing Link and Insectosaurus, and the government renames her Ginormica and forbids contact with her family. Far away, an alien overlord named Gallaxhar learns of a powerful substance on Earth and sends a gigantic robot probe. President Hathaway agrees to set the monsters free if they can stop it.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Monsters vs. Aliens (2009)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film began as an adaptation of the horror comic Rex Havoc, trademarked by DreamWorks in 2002. A 2005 synopsis had Rex gathering monsters including Insectosaurus and the 50,000 Pound Woman to fight aliens who were disrupting cable TV, before Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman scrapped it and built the story from scratch.
- DreamWorks Animation's Ed Leonard put the film at roughly 45.6 million computing hours, more than eight times what the first Shrek took. It ran on over 9,000 server processor cores and used 120 terabytes of data, 6 of them for a single explosion.
- Monsters vs. Aliens was the film that switched DreamWorks Animation over for good: from it on, every feature the studio released was made in stereoscopic 3D using Intel's InTru3D technology.
- To work out how a giant would move through San Francisco, the crew filmed animator Line Andersen, who was tall, thin and athletic like Ginormica, walking beside a scale model of the city.
- Every monster was built out of old B movies without copying one: Susan grows to 49 feet 11 inches as a wink at Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Dr. Cockroach comes from The Fly and The Curse of Frankenstein, B.O.B. from The Blob and The Crawling Eye, and the 350-foot Insectosaurus nods to Mothra.
