previous page
ISSUE
TOC
250
F eatures
Depth of Feeling
Pete Docter tests Pixar’s creative limits with Inside Out’s journey into the emotional mind of an 11-year-old girl. By Tom McLean.
E
llie Docter led a normal, very happy childhood — much to the delight of her father, Pete Docter, director of such hit Pixar movies as Monsters, Inc. and Up. But something changed when she turned 12: Her goofy, fun personality took a turn toward monosyllabic answers with outbursts of anger and disgust. None of which is anything unusual or new for parents to have to deal with, but when Docter thought to himself, “What’s going on in her head?” it ignited an idea that began a demanding five-year journey that ends with the June 19 release of Inside Out. “I had pretty sparse elements at the very beginning,” says Docter. “I had a concept of a kid and ... inside (her head) you’d see the emotions. I didn’t even know which ones were there or what the kid was doing or anything like that. It was just kind of the basic concept, and then from there it grew — and along the way we took a lot of dead-end wrong turns. But that’s the usual process.” Inside Out tells the story of an 11-year-old girl named Riley and the emotions that live in-
side her mind: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. When Riley and her parents move from Minnesota to San Francisco, her typically happy outlook begins to change as Joy and Sadness find themselves flung from her mind’s Headquarters to the far corners of her mind and have to find a way back. It’s a journey that takes them through lands like Abstract Thought, the movie-studio confines of Dream Productions, to a trip on the Train of Thought and into the depths of the Subconscious. Docter — who reunited with producer Jonas Rivera under the ever-present eye of chief creative officer and executive producer John Lasseter — says at the start they looked into a lot of research into how the brain and emotions work and change through a life. What they learned suggested Docter’s instincts were pointed in the right direction. “Psychologists told us that out of everyone on Earth, there’s no more socially attuned creature than an 11- to 15- or 16-year-old girl,” says Docter, who also wrote the screenplay with Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley. “They’re just so dialed in to all social cues and reactions
and so we felt like, it’s based on real life, the science is reinforcing that, I think we’re at the right place. And there must be something for me that I haven’t quite put to bed about growing up and the difficulty of that that makes it still intriguing to me.”
A Difficult Birth
But a concept is not a story, and coming up with one was difficult. It’s a process that had more than one filmmaker at Pixar invoking the word “nervous” when considering how Inside Out might be received when it’s released. One such crewmember is production designer Ralph Eggleston, who says the extraordinary number of changes the film went through made it difficult to see how everything would fit together. “The idea itself is so intellectual and I never felt I completely got a footing on the conceit of how the world works because there was so much churn,” he says. “Pete and I would have talks, and he’d be feeling the same thing, and we would just have to say this is the hardest thing we’ve ever done. All we could do was
10 www.animationmagazine.net june 15
TOC
previous page
