INSIDE OUT 2015

Pete Docter on the risks taken by Pixar’s most emotional film

THE HIGH-CONCEPT PREMISE

With the benefit of hindsight — universally positive reviews, the best part of a billion dollars at the box office, and now the highest-placed Pixar film on this list — Inside Out seems like a safe bet. But at the time, setting a film inside a brain with emotions as the main characters was a gamble. “It’s not an easy sell,” admits Pete Docter. “As a director, I never thought about that. It’s only now that I’m in this position” — Docter is currently Chief Creative Officer at Pixar — “that I start to go... wow, that’s a pretty far-out concept. But it felt very relatable to me. Everybody has emotions. Everyone’s been through the process of growing up.”

THE MESSAGE OF SADNESS

Equally as bold is the film’s central message: that it’s okay to be sad. Docter acknowledges there was some pushback on this idea. “I’m not sure about the UK, but in the US, we don’t like to feel sad,” he says. “There’s a burgeoning drug industry to avoid exactly that feeling. But it is a necessary and crucial part of human existence. It signals that we need help.” Docter estimates he receives letters “almost every month” from fans grateful for helping kids understand sadness.

THE DEATH OF BING BONG

The film’s most emotional moment comes, improbably, with the death of an imaginary catelephant-dolphin hybrid named Bing Bong. But the character, voiced by Richard Kind, was not doomed from the start. During script stages, the Pixar team were struggling to figure out how to get Joy (Amy Poehler) out of the Memory Dump. “And then I remember thinking, ‘I know what has to happen!’” recalls Docter. “‘We have to kill off Bing Bong.’ I was kind of happy, weirdly.” He chuckles. “That sounds sadistic. But it just felt so right for what this film was trying to say — the bittersweet passing of childhood. I pitched it to people here and they were like, ‘You’re awful!’ But it worked out well.”