Creators give the scoop on ‘Inside Out’
In “Inside Out,” which opens Friday and debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May to rapturous crowds and kudos, the emotions of an 11-year-old girl are brought to life Pixar-style.
Joy (the voice of Amy Poehler) is a sparkling, google-eyed pixie. Sadness (“The Office’s” Phyllis Smith) is a roly-poly blob of blue, sporting big round glasses and a look of helpless woe. Anger (the ranting, raging Lewis Black) is squat and red and blows flames out of his head. Disgust (Mindy Kaling), green from head to toe, sneers contemptuously at everyone and everything. And Fear (Bill Hader) wears a nerdy bow tie, rubbing his purply hands together with worry, ready to slink into a crevice at the first sign of trouble.
They operate inside the head of Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), working the controls and being sorely tested when her parents (Kyle MacLachlan, Diane Lane) decide to pick up and move from Minnesota to San Francisco.
“We had some other emotions in there early on,” says Pete Docter, who codirected and cowrote “Inside Out,” and who, not altogether coincidentally, moved from Minnesota to the Bay Area (with a stop at Cal Arts in greater L.A.) when he landed a job at Pixar. His daughter also happened to be 11 when the idea for the movie popped into his brain.
The other emotions that nearly crowded into Riley’s head? Pride was one. Schadenfreude was another (he had a German accent). “And Ennui,” says Jonas Rivera, who produced “Inside Out” with Docter and has worked with his Pixar colleague on a number of computergenerated ’toons. You may have heard of a couple of them: “Up” (Academy Award for best animated feature) and “Monsters, Inc.” (four Oscar nominations, $562.8 million in global receipts).
“The line was something like, ‘Hey, we’ll call you guys if anything comes up — is that all right with you, Ennui?’ ” Rivera remembers. “And he went, ‘Eh.’ ”
If Ennui and Schadenfreude didn’t make the final cut, there’s still plenty going on inside Riley’s head that is, well, not the stuff of typical pipsqueak fare. There are references to abstract thought, the subconscious, even nonobjective fragmentation, whatever that is.
Docter is ready to concede that a few of his own emotions (Self-doubt, Dread) bubbled up from time to time during the five years he and Rivera and their team were readying “Inside Out,” budgeted at a reported $150 million to $200 million. (Computer animation is a famously painstaking, snail-paced process.) But there was the hope, at least, that children would get it.
Maybe the parents would, too.
“I always had confidence that kids would be attracted to the same things we were in terms of the fun and the comedy and the characters and the world they inhabit,” says Docter. “Where we did have doubts was in terms of complexity. Because we have ‘core memories,’ ‘personality islands’ — all these rules and concepts to try to lay down for people.”
So a year and a half ago, Pixar test-screened a workin-progress “Inside Out” to a key demographic.
“We brought in a lot of kids,” says Rivera. “Our kids, neighbors’ kids, kids on the soccer team, and we did a little Q&A afterward. ... And we were really pleased because these kids spoke back to us, very accurately, all of the concepts. ... Without (us) asking leading questions, they would say, ‘Well, there are five emotions,’ and they would name them and say what their jobs were.”
“It’s been rewarding to see the kids really grasp it,” adds Docter.
Maybe it comes from working at Pixar — Docter has been there since 1989 (he was the third animator hired), Rivera has been there 21 years (starting out as a production assistant on “Toy Story”) — but the two men have decidedly, well, animated attributes. Docter is ridiculously tall, with a long, narrow face in- terrupted by a pair of thick rectangular glasses. Rivera commonly speaks through a big smile. His ears are elfish, jauntily protruding from a baseball cap.
“We’ve got lots of stuff going on at Pixar right now,” Docter says. “In fact, this is going to be a pretty banner year for us because we have two films coming out. ‘The Good Dinosaur’ comes out in November. Everybody’s madly scrambling to finish that one.
“And then we’ve got a bunch more stuff: ‘Finding Dory,’ the sequel to ‘Finding Nemo,’ that comes out next summer. And then there’s stuff stacked up for years.”
Docter and Rivera have been kicking around ideas, too, although they haven’t had a chance to pitch them to the boss — John Lasseter, the creative chief at Pixar and Disney.
“Just like when we were doing ‘Up,’ we had some ideas,” Rivera says. “And one of those ideas was this one, ‘Inside Out,’ so we hope to continue that cycle, to get another one going soon.” Docter is ready, too. “It’s interesting,” he says, “as this wraps up and people seem to be enjoying certain things about it, there’s a tendency for me to want to look for more of that in some way. I’m not saying a sequel, but just the idea that the elements, the ingredients of finding something that rings true and taps into the emotions — that’s tempting to try again.
“On the other hand, I’m also really attracted to doing something really new, so we’ll see what happens.”
But don’t hold your breath.
“In another five years, probably,” Docter says. “Sometimes I feel, well, it would be nice if we could go a little faster.”