Check out this video for some interesting examples of how Pixar adapts its movies for international audiences. The title design of Soul varies depending on the country. So do the newspaper clippings that celebrate chef Linguini in Ratatouille. Ellie’s iconic adventure book in Up gets translated from the original English to other languages.
Coco was the first Pixar movie to come out in US theaters in both English and Spanish. With the animated feature set in Mexico, six of the voice actors reprised their roles in Spanish. In Up, a money jar has Paradise Falls written on it in the original English version, but in other languages, the jar has an image on it instead making it comprehensible on a global scale. In Monsters University, we see the same thing, where the Scare Games banner doesn’t get translated but replaced with Greek letters.
Sometimes the changes made are a direct reflection of culture. During a feeding scene in Inside Out, animators replaced broccoli with bell peppers in the Japanese version. Riley’s dad daydreams about a hockey game, which gets replaced with football – a far more popular game – in the international film. There’s a lot of thought going into Pixar movies, which shows in those subtle details that most of us don’t even notice.
