JUMPING FOR JOY
Writer/director Pete Docter gets emotional…
Leading up to its release, reviews for Inside Out were ecstatic, but even its most ardent admirers couldn’t help but wonder if Pixar’s latest might go over kids’ heads as it burrowed inside the mind of its protagonist, Riley. Pete Docter had no such worries. With Monsters Inc. and Up, he’d already pushed the boundaries of animation – thematically, visually – and Inside Out was, for him, a no-brainer.
“The thing that first appealed to me was the idea of emotions represented as characters,” he tells Total Film as he looks back on his 2015 classic. “It just seemed like pure animation. We did research. One of the consultants we worked with posited there are six emotions: anger, fear, sadness, joy, disgust and surprise. As I thought about Surprise and Fear as cartoon characters, it was like: ‘They’re pretty similar. I’ll just mould those together.’”
Sure, but was he confident that kids could get their heads around concepts such as ‘Abstract Thinking’, or was that one for the mums and dads? “Kids are way more intelligent than we give them credit for,” he shrugs. “They almost speak ‘emotion’ first, right? I knew that if we could make it visual, we could simplify it.” Docter laughs. “We had a screening when we were working on it, just to confirm to ourselves: ‘Are kids getting the islands of personality, and all that?’ They totally got everything. Five-year-olds described to their parents exactly what had happened.”
The Pixar Braintrust, of course, is renowned for remoulding and reshaping their stories. Inside Out was no exception, with many ideas tasted and then spat out. “We had a whole bunch of characters that Riley had imagined and created that were now disused – they were like hobos in the Train Of Thought sorting yard,” says Docter. But one character refused to exit. “We always liked Bing Bong, the imaginary friend. It just seemed so emblematic of what we were trying to do with the film – you know, this idea of the passing of childhood, and how that propels things forward.”
Docter’s faith proved well-placed. Inside Out took $858m at the box office and is now, more importantly, number 8 in Total Film’s movies of the decade list. “It’s incredibly heartwarming,” says Docter. “That’s not the reason we make the films. We’re just trying to make them as entertaining, compelling and relatable as possible. But boy, that’s kind of the ultimate receipt: hey, it worked!” INSIDE OUT IS AVAILABLE ON DVD AND BLU-RAY.