Yeah. I’m also reminded of the beginning of Monsters, Inc. Once it’s revealed that we’re in a simulation lab, the kid in the bed is shown to be just a realistic-looking (in the context of a Pixar movie where the heroes look like stuffed toys) human torso on a spring-loaded lever. That fake kid looked much creepier to me than he looked when we thought he was an actual boy in bed. And I think that may have resulted in the simulation dummies in the sequel Monsters University looking more like actual dummies than resembling actual humans. This was explained in the movie as the result of the University acquiring older, secondhand, less-state-of-the-art testing equipment, but I honestly think it quite possible that more than a few kids in the audience were freaked out by Torso Boy in the first movie and Pixar deliberately made the dummies far less realistic in the sequel, since they’d be getting so much screen time to serve the needs of the sequel’s story.
