Pixar’s emotional rollercoaster
Production team behind inside Out share process in five-year project
FEAR, anger, disgust, sadness and joy have taken over Pixar headquarters, and things are going great. The Oscar-winning animation studio is celebrating the completion of Inside Out, a film that features each of those emotions as personified characters controlling operations inside in a girl’s head.
Sculptures, sketches, paintings and other concept art from the film five years in the making fills a gallery at the studio’s resort-like headquarters in Northern California. Some 350 artists and technicians collaborated under the direction of Pete Docter ( Up, Monsters, Inc.) to bring the imaginative adventure to life.
Inside Out tells a story of two worlds – the external, human world and the internal landscape of the mind – and how they influence one another. As 11-year-old Riley navigates the human world, including a move from her native Minnesota to San Francisco, her mind’s staff of emotions handle her internal goings-on.
With the project recently completed, Docter and producer Jonas Rivera invited reporters to Pixar to explain why Inside Out was so timeconsuming.
Animated movies typically take longer than live action to produce because everything has to be built – not only the sets and costumes but the characters and cameras. On this film, though, the artists had to create entire worlds.
Inside Out started with an idea from Docter inspired by his daughter, who’d gone from an outgoing, happy kid to a quiet, sullen pre-teen. He imagined a story set inside a little girl’s mind that explored what went on in there. His team met with neuroscientists and psychologists to learn some basics about emotion, memory and mind function.
Then it was up to the story artists to develop characters based on that information, conceptualise how they should look and act and come up with a script. Following that is the filming, animating and lighting, among other processes.
“In animation, it’s camera, action, lights,” said director of photography Patrick Lin.
The film is set for release June 19.