Only a real detective could have spotted these.
When most people watch movies, they only notice the major things happening on-screen. But filmmakers are artists and nerds at heart and they often utilize the visual medium to its fullest extent and hide little details, homages, and
easter eggs that only other true nerds would notice.
1
In Coraline (2009), the crew spent 800 hours painting 250,000 pieces of popcorn—pink on the outside, red on the kernel—to stand in as blossoms for the nearly 70 trees.
2
In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), before Harry gets sucked into Tom Riddle’s diary, he’s in a candlelit room. When he’s in the diary, everything is in black and white, yet we can still see the candlelight flickering on his body.
3
In Saving Mr. Banks (2013), you can see the special Oscar that Walt Disney won for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
4
In Lego Movie (2014), after traveling to the human world and being picked up off the floor by Finn, Emmet returns to the Lego world with a faint fingerprint on his left torso, presumably left by Finn, which was not visible earlier in the film.
5
The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). The script for Sean Bean’s Council of Elrond speech was rewritten the night before filming. Bean taped his lines to his knee so he could read them when necessary. Some of the characters frustrated expressions in the scene are actually the actor glancing at his lines.
6
In Moana (2016), Moana has a pig and a rooster as sidekicks during the film. It is a sailor tradition to get a tattoo of a pig and a chicken on each foot in order to survive a shipwreck. This is because chickens and pigs often survived shipwrecks due to their buoyant containers.
7
In An American Tail (1986), the color of the Statue of Liberty is historically accurate. As the film is set in 1885, the year the statue was completed, it still has its bright copper coloring. It was only after 1900 that the statue turned the green patina color due to oxidation.
8
In one of the first few scenes, we see Woody being held up with cloud wallpaper in the background. At the end of the third movie, when Woody says goodbye to Andy, the movie ends in the clouds which are identical to his old wallpaper.
9
In Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), after the popsicle gag, Spider-Man is slammed against the screen by Doc Ock. His face is distorted in a single frame to match the face of the popsicle.
10
In Rise of the Guardians (2012), the tooth fairy identifies a mouse as a member of the “European division” of the tooth fairies. This mouse is “Ratoncito Peréz,” a character from a Spanish children’s book. In the Spanish dub of the movie, it is even called “Pérez.”
11
In the movie Rango (2011), the character of Rattlesnake Jake is based on the character Angel Eyes, the main villain in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), right down to his black scales that resemble the character’s famous mustache.
12
In the beginning of Joker (2019) there’s a familiar face in the mirror.
13
In Monsters, Inc. (2001), the monsters use doors as portals to enter the human world and harvest energy by scaring children. In Monsters University (2013), since the movie takes place in the past, the doors are bigger and clunkier because the technology of that time was less advanced.
14
At the end of the movie, The Secret Life of Pets (2016), the animals all return to their owners, at which point, the guinea pig Norman is back in bed with his young owner, and on the bedside table, you can see a minion toy. Illumination Entertainment is also the production company behind Despicable Me (2010) and Minions (2015).
15
In Monsters University power comes from screams, which appear in a gaseous state in the scream tanks. Because power here is a gas, light switches are valves and instead of wires there are pipes.
