BRAIN CANDY
Pixar’s Inside Out is so much more than a kids’ movie.
It’s refreshing to see a film that isn’t afraid to tackle the big questions. How does a memory begin? What is the role of melancholy and nostalgia in a happy life? Where do bad ideas come from?
But come on. Any two-bit summer blockbuster can provide insight into those head-scratchers. I’m pretty sure Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 has a handle on the last one already. Inside Out goes for the REALLY big questions. Like how it is you’ll never forget that radio jingle you heard as a child. Or why your cat suddenly, and with no apparent external stimuli, decides to freak out. It’s also (probably) the first kids’ movie to use the phrase “nonobjective fragmentation.”
But that’s because it’s not really a kids’ movie — or rather, it’s not just a kids’ movie. It operates on two levels simultaneously. For youngsters, it’s the story of 11-year-old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), whose life gets upended when her parents uproot her from Minnesota and move to San Francisco.
Riley has to make sense of her new environment with the help of five primary emotions that live, John Malkovich-style, in her noodle. Leader of the pack — ego, if you will — is Joy (Amy Poehler), with the body of Tinkerbell and the soul of Peter Pan. Keeping Riley safe are Fear (Bill Hader) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling). Balancing out the brainpan are Phyllis Smith as Sadness and Lewis Black as Anger, the last a so-perfect casting choice, it could only have been bested if they had hired Christoph Waltz as Schadenfreude.
Older brains will also get a kick out of the workplace dynamics at play — these five put the gang in basal ganglia! Things get complicated when Joy and Sadness, who naturally don’t see eye to eye, get accidentally transported to Riley’s long-term memory and have to make the perilous journey back to HQ while the others try to keep their girl on an even keel without them. But if your own long-term storage includes first-hand recall of the 1980s, say, or the birth of a child, be prepared for an even deeper experience.
Inside Out’s writers-directors Pete Docter (Up) and Ronaldo Del Carmen, bolstered by scribes Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley, have taken apart Riley’s 11-yearold psyche and put it back together with primary colours and a touch of whimsy. Thus the dream-production centre of her brain — which looks like a Hollywood studio — includes coming-attraction posters for such sleeper hits as I Can Fly and I’m Falling for a Very Long Time Into a Dark Pit. There’s an actual train of thought that shuttles randomly through the cerebellum, and workers who maintain Riley’s labyrinthine long-term memory, which resembles an endless library stacked with bowling balls, each colour-coded to the emotion of the recollection.
There are also “islands of personality,” devoted to concepts such as honesty, family and hockey, Riley’s favourite sport. And her developing brain has a new production centre working on an imaginary boyfriend. To keep him inaccessible, he’s from Canada.
Watching Joy and Sadness muddle their way through this phantasmagoric landscape is great fun, but let your own mind wander and you may find it pondering more than just why the islands of personality have such a heavy-industry, oil-refinery look to them. You may recall your own earliest memories — happy, sad, tinged with embarrassment or nostalgia — or you may contemplate the ones you’re forming these days.
And then, just as suddenly, the movie pulls you into its absurdist humour again. A peek inside the brains of Riley’s parents (voiced by Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan) finds that hers looks like the set of The View, while his could be mistaken for a scene from Anchorman.
There’s a limit to how deep you should let yourself fall into Inside Out. But it will certainly make you laugh, cry, seethe, recoil and freeze — in all the best ways, of course.
LOS ANGELES — Pixar’s Pete Docter decided to push the envelope of animated storytelling by examining the mind of an 11-year-old girl. The inspiration for his complex concept was a homemade concoction.
“I noticed my daughter growing up, being a little less goofy and wacky and funny, and a little more shy and quiet because she had turned 11,” says Docter of daughter Elie, now 17.
“And at the same time, I was looking at different ideas for a film and I thought about (her) emotions as characters.”
The result, co-directed and cowritten by Docter, is the comedy Inside Out. As writer and/ or director, Docter’s other credits include WALL-E; Monsters, Inc.; Up; and the upcoming Toy Story 4.
Inside Out takes place mostly in the mind of 11-year-old Riley, as defined by the emotions of Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and Anger (Lewis Black).
When Riley is uprooted to San Francisco from the comfortable surroundings of a small town in Minnesota, the adolescent tries to adjust as Joy feels diminished by the other apparent negative feelings. One-liners compete with lots of animated antics, yet there is a subtext of melancholia that Docter included to provide a realistic profile. The mix was a challenge, and the delicate balance didn’t happen overnight.
First, Docter and his producing partner Jonas Rivera had to successfully pitch John Lasseter, head of Disney and Pixar animation studios. But even the upbeat Lasseter warned Docter “it was a cool idea” but the movie would be difficult to pull off.
“And I didn’t really see that at the time,” says Docter, who had similar creative struggles blending comedy and pathos in his previous Pixar movie Up. “I was too taken by the fun of it.”
After more than four years of refinements and rewrites, additions and deletions, the filmmaker says he has accomplished what he set out to do.
He gives a lot of credit to the comic actors who provided the five emotions with the appropriately entertaining, yet involving, personalities.
For instance, caustic comedian Black, who voices Anger, was the first hired because Docter couldn’t resist. “Lewis Black was one that, even as I was pitching the concept, I was thinking of,” the director says.
“I was like the first one cast, so I was really the tipping point,” says Black, who often appears on The Daily Show to present exaggerated editorial rants. “As soon as the others heard I was in it, they couldn’t wait to be with me.”
Hader says he had been “stalking” Pixar since 2010 when he showed up unannounced at the studio lot near San Francisco hoping for a tour. When Docter and company needed to see how a live TV show operated for an Inside Out sequence, Hader arranged for them to spend a week shadowing the Saturday Night Live crew.
Poehler, who just wrapped her final season on Parks and Recreation, says working on Joy was a rewarding group effort.
“I have a theory,” Poehler says. “With the exception of a few eccentric geniuses, I feel like most talented people are good collaborators because they are not threatened by other people’s good ideas because they have a million of them.”
Kaling, who executive produces, co-writes and stars in the sitcom The Mindy Project, agrees with Hader and Poehler. She says collaborating with Pixar would be the equivalent of dating “this really well-raised guy that doesn’t know he looks like Tom Brady.”
Defining Disgust for Kaling turned out to be an an exercise in emoting as “a very impatient, judgmental adolescent girl.”
Smith might be best known for playing the saleswoman Phyllis on The Office. She jumped at the chance to be Sadness, with a few adjustments.
“I’m just a mess and I’m a real sad sack,” she says, joking.
“I was looking at different ideas for a film and I thought about (my daughter’s) emotions as characters.
PETE DOCTER
INSIDE OUT CO-WRITER/DIRECTOR