Pixar Hides A113 in Every Feature Film

Room A113 at the California Institute of the Arts is a first-year classroom for graphic design and character animation. John Lasseter sat in it. Brad Bird did too. Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Brenda Chapman, and a long list of others came through the same door.

For decades now, Pixar alums have hidden the code A113 somewhere in every feature they make. It is on Andy's mom's license plate in Toy Story. It's the camera model identifier in Finding Nemo. Wall-E's onboard directive carries the tag A113. In Ratatouille, a guard walks past a door marked A113. In Monsters, Inc., it's the lecture-hall room where Waternoose scolds Sulley.

Brad Bird was the first to drop it in, in a 1987 episode of Amazing Stories he animated called 'Family Dog.' He has since put it in The Iron Giant (on a Charles Schwab commercial truck), The Incredibles (as a prison cell number), and Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, which he directed but Pixar did not produce.

The joke has leaked outside Pixar. Doctor Who, The Simpsons, Lilo & Stitch, and a string of Disney television shows now drop A113 into backgrounds. Spotting it has become one of the reliable pleasures of freeze-framing a CG kids' movie. It is a signature by people who once shared a classroom, still shouting at each other across twenty-five years of filmographies.