inside out
Pixar’s Pete Docter gets mighty introspective as he follows Up.
DIRECTORS PETE DOCTER, RONNIE DEL CARMEN
STARRING AMY POEHLER, MINDY KALING, KYLE MACLACHLAN, BILL HADER, PHYLLIS SMITH
ET A 24 JULY
PETE DOCTER, DIRECTOR “We try to do new stuff every time we attack a new film, to push things and go into areas we haven’t before. I was watching my daughter [ Elie, who voiced
Young Ellie in Up], who had just gone from a very energetic, happy, bouncy kid to a much more sullen, quiet 11-year-old. It made me wonder what was going on in her head. Thinking about emotions and the role they play in our lives, I thought, ‘Man, this could be a really cool thing for animation...’”
RONNIE DEL CARMEN, CO-DIRECTOR “I have older kids than Pete, I went through all that already and it was heartbreaking for me. It felt like, ‘Where did my daughter go?’ The things you used to have fun doing together, they don’t want to do any more. In effect, that child disappears. That’s a loss I felt so much when my daughter and my son started changing; I wish that they were kids again but you can’t keep them there. And if it’s happening to you, see if it affects an audience.”
GOLDEN MEMORIES
RDC: “Memory’s a very big role in the movie. What we understand now is that short-term memory actually lives with you – as the term implies – during the day and is still not permanent; when you go to sleep, it gets stored away into long-term memory. So short-term memory is something that’s around the Emotions in Headquarters [ the coloured globes]; long-term memory is somewhere else. All our memories seem to be housed somewhere. It seems to be a limitless storage capacity. We want to make it look like a giant landscape of memory storage, to imply how vast the world is.”
LIFE OF RILEY
PD: “We have two storylines going on – the story of Riley [ Kaitlyn Dias], as well as Joy – and we realised the more interconnected they were, the better both stories became. When we could design a world that was affected by Riley’s decisions and, vice-versa, when Joy made some move that would cause Riley to act in a certain way, it upped the game. We had early discussions about whether the Emotions are what make Riley, Riley – is she a big machine that they operate? We figured out: no, that’s not the way we think of ourselves, first of all; our emotions make us feel certain things and then we decide how we’re going to act. The way we ended up was Riley as a separate being, and the Emotions love and care for her, and want what’s best for her, but they’re separate.”
STAYING ALIVE
PD: “You don’t really think of emotions – I didn’t – as having a real purpose, but every one of them has helped us survive in various situations. Fear [ Bill
Hader] is obvious; it helps to keep you safe.” RDC: “We tried many different kinds of characters. We tried Hope. We tried Pride. But eventually it all came down to the five that we have, because all those other characters seem to have things that we really want to have; that kind of cancels each other out, so we wanted to make sure that we can have something very unique for each of them to do.”
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
PD: “We got some great comedy out of the fact that the Emotions speak like adults but are operating under the limited knowledge a kid has. Early on, we had lines like, ‘OK, we all agree that boys are icky, right?’ ‘Yes, of course.’ They’re treating it like a board meeting but they’re talking about, like, ‘If we swing too high, we’ll turn inside out.’ Not a lot of it ended up in the film but what’s there points towards the juxtaposition, that comedy arises out of that contrast.”
RDC: “We started actually to characterise them as this group of very benevolent of aunts and uncles who want nothing but the best for their child. They’re advisors and guides and guardians. There was a time when we wanted to go crazy about this concept. At one point, we had wanted to visit inside a baby brother’s head. We go inside and there’ll be two Emotions. The two Emotions have only two buttons – ‘eat’ and ‘poop’. They’re always confused as to which button is it right now? Is it ‘eat’ or ‘poop’? Then there was a goldfish in the house that we visited. We go inside the goldfish and we go inside the control centre. There’s a control, but there’s no one there.”
ANGER MANAGEMENT
PD: “The artists here are very intuitive and in touch. I would give them character descriptions and they would draw thousands of different designs. For example, when you feel anger, you feel hot and red and kind of contained, like boxed-up. Even as I drew him for some early meetings, Anger [ Lewis Black] showed up for me as a boxy kind of square. That whole character came quickly.” RDC: “Even though Anger really wants to do his job, he doesn’t want to do it to the detriment of Riley. He doesn’t want to get her in trouble. He wants to defend her from things that can go wrong in life, from things like injustice and unfairness. He’s not so gung-ho on what he wants to do, his skill, that he puts her in a compromised situation. That actually creates characters that feel like they have a range of things to do, other than just being angry all the time and feel anger.”
MINDSCAPES
PD: “Our job is to take this esoteric, abstract concept of an idea and make it practical, physical and real, which is not easy. You can’t just look at cars or insects or fish as an inspiration point because this movie takes place inside the mind and not the brain, so it’s not blood vessels and dendrites, yet there were inspirations from the shape of the human brain. The reason for the folding is to give you more surface area, because the brain is about connections and inter-connections. That also worked for us storywise because we knew we needed to have Joy [ Amy
Poehler] lost. Her goal is to get back to Headquarters so we’re trying, from a story point of view, to stop her from doing that.”
THE ART OF JOY
PD: “I kind of knew from the very beginning I wanted Joy to be female... I don’t know why. I wanted the whole cast to be a range, as wide and diverse as we could get. I originally called her ‘Optimism’ because I didn’t know much about emotions at the time – that was one of the things where research really helped give us more clarity and definition for the jobs these characters had.”
RDC: “As soon as we started to make her behave, [ we realised] she can’t be joyful all the time, because she’ll be annoying. Someone who’s always up and happy makes you want to slap them.”
PD: “Joy was probably the hardest, because that spirit of joyfulness, when overdone, is really off-putting. Really, Joy is our main character. We really identified strongly with Joy.”
PD: “It ended up being somewhat of a therapy session – most of the movies do. It was pretty clear early on we were making a film about ourselves as parents watching our kids grow up: ‘Oh, my kid, I can’t get her to laugh when I act goofy any more...’ We always try to pour something of ourselves into the films; even if it’s about cars or monsters or bugs, we’re trying to put some experience of our own into the films so they speak to us as people. Sometimes people get angry with me. They see Up, for example, and say, ‘You jerk, you made me cry’. I always take that as a great compliment.”