Material handling equipment plays starring role in Monsters, Inc.

Any one of the 45,000 people who attended the ProMat trade show in Chicago this month saw a huge variety of material handling equipment on the vast floors of the McCormick Place convention center. From automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS) at SencorpWhite and conveyors at Intralox and from the most basic racks, totes, and pallets to the latest augmented reality smart glasses at Zebra and the autonomous robots at Otto Motors and Locus Robotics.

It was more warehouse hardware in one room than most people see in a year… that is, unless you have kids who are fans of the 2001 animated Disney movie “Monsters, Inc.”

I was recently writing one last ProMat story for our conference coverage and pulled a classic double-take when I glanced up from my laptop to see the very same equipment on our family TV set. It was the climactic chase scene at the end—you know, the one where the loyal monsters Sulley and Mike are defending the cute kid they’ve nicknamed “Boo” from an assault by the scheming monsters Randall and Waternoose, who…

OK, let’s move past the complex plot twists and get back to material handling equipment. The scene unfolds in a massive warehouse packed with thousands of closet doors that are carried by an automated carousel system with diverters and mergers, connected to conveyors and compactors, as robotic arms grasp and release the inventory, and managers sort the goods with a computer keyboard that must have been connected to a warehouse management system (WMS).

As a dedicated consumer of animated children’s films (no really, I have young kids), I can vouch that it was probably the most high profile display of warehouse tech in an animated film since, well, “Storks.” But that’s a different story.