In April 2024, Total Film visited Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California to watch the first 30 minutes of the upcoming sequel, Inside Out 2, and get a glimpse into the minds of those involved in its creation.
Inside Out was released in 2015 and is one of Pixar's highest-ranked films (it was Total Film's highest-ranked animated film of the 2020s, at #8). It was a huge critical and commercial hit, with a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and over $850 million at the box office, and its concept of anthropomorphic emotions operating inside a young girl's mind quickly became ingrained in the public consciousness.
There was clearly room for expansion on this concept — the film's final minutes peer into the minds of other characters, hinting at room for exploration — and it ends with a line that perfectly sets up a sequel: As lead character Joy (Amy Poehler) says, “After all, Riley's already 12. What's going to happen?”
Nine years later, the answer is finally revealed. Inside Out 2 begins with Riley one year later. Now 13 years old, she embarks on hockey tryouts for a new team, dealing with friendship drama, cool older players, and the unexpected emotions that come with the onset of adolescence. In addition to joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust, new emotions arrive: embarrassment, envy, ennui, and most notably, anxiety. The consoles are now wider, have more buttons, and are so much easier to use… See above for an exclusive image of Anxiety in front of a control panel, taken from the upcoming issue of Total Film magazine (with Twisters on the cover).
In a world-building that is literally mind-expanding, we also see Riley's belief system, which gives rise to the beliefs she holds true, and her emotions leading to a vault where secrets are kept.
Pixar's Steve Jobs Building is an incredibly exciting workplace to visit. It's filled with inspiring concept art, cool details, a ton of Oscars, and some of the most skilled creative craftsmen around. Read on for some cool tidbits we picked up during our visit…
Inside Out 2 features video game characters
In the aforementioned secret vault, we encounter Bluffy, a 2D animated dog from Riley's favorite preschool show, as well as Lance Slashblade, a Final Fantasy-esque character who also lurks there. Lance (voiced by Yong Ye) is a fun, pixelated character prone to glitches and at odds with the smooth, vibrant animation that's the standard in the rest of the film. He's one of the humorous highlights of the footage shown, mining the same well of laughs as Keanu Reeves' Duke Caboom in Toy Story 4.
TF had the chance to ask director Kelsey Mann about the inspiration for the character. “You know where he comes from?” Mann explains. “When you're a teenager and you're not dating, you start to develop feelings of love. And it's not just people, you can fall in love with a cartoon character. I say this from experience! Or you can fall in love with a video game character. We thought, 'Oh, that would be so cool. Riley falling in love with a video game character. We could make that character animate like she was out of a video game and give her that look, that pixelated look.' We thought, 'That would be really fun and hopefully something that a lot of people can really relate to.'”
Production designer Jason Deamer adds that this kind of “bad” animation is harder for Pixar than its usual high-end productions. “It was the hardest for Lance because we had like 12 meetings before we'd even made anything,” Deamer says. “And that's because, you know, Pixar is so good at 3D animation. [animation]… We have a pipeline. It's a well-oiled machine.' But that's not the case when it comes to creating outside-the-box animation.
Maya Hawke's Stranger Things role helped her get the role
While some animated films may seem to target A-list actors over character actors, producer Mark Nielsen explains that all of the voice actor casting is done “blind,” listening to candidates without knowing who the actors are. “Our casting team came up with a number of candidates who they thought would be suitable for the voice of the anxiety,” he says. “They just say, 'Actor 1' and 'Actor 2,' and we look at an image of the character, see what it looks like on screen, and see if the voice fits.”
“And as soon as we heard Maya, and it was probably clips from Stranger Things or other stuff she's done, she has this incredible ability to speak super fast, she can say 1,000 words in three seconds. And there was this air of tension in some of her clips, and we thought, 'She could be good at this.'”
There was a feeling of jealousy
Also starring in the film are Paul Walter Hauser as Embarrassment, Adele Exarchopoulos as Ennui, and The Bear's Ayo Edebiri as Envy. “Envy is one of my favorite new characters,” says Munn. “He was a character that took a long time to develop. Jealousy is actually in the film, too. I wanted them to be twins, so no one would know the difference. But Envy wants what other people have.”
Every emotion design starts with a simple color and shape, so it makes sense that Envy is small, has big eyes, and is green.”[With] “I wanted Envy to be the smallest,” Mann says, “because I wanted her to be as tall as everyone else, and to be able to reach the console like everyone else, but I knew it would be hard for her to reach the console, so I went in that direction, and she bonded right away.”
Shame was almost the “big villain.”
Jealousy wasn't the only emotion that didn't make it into the sequel. At one point, there were plans to include Shame as an antagonist. “She was cut from the movie,” Diemer recalls. “Shame was in it, but she was one of the villains in the original. [characters]”
But there were two problems with this idea: “One, she was too sarcastic and monotone: 'Oh, I'm evil. Too bad!' And two, Dacher Keltner [professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley] He helped me with the first film and told me that he thinks of shame as more of a state of mind than an emotion. Not everyone feels shame. Speaking of emotions: [Keltner] He is the author of the original book and is the national expert in the field. Everyone has joy and sorrow. Not everyone feels shame. That's why it's considered a state, not an emotion. [concept drawing of Shame, though] – Great design.
The world of cinema is expanding, and so are aspect ratios
The world of Inside Out 2 expands as more of Riley's psyche is revealed (and her social horizons begin to widen), but things get bigger in another way, literally, thanks to the filmmakers' embrace of widescreen, presented in a wider 2.39:1 aspect ratio compared to the original's 1.85:1.
“One of the things that's really exciting about this film is that we now have a widescreen canvas,” says cinematographer Adam Habib. “In the first film, the whole idea was to have a more tactile imperfection and physical quality to the camera in the human world, which is Riley's story. And the camera in the mind world, which is Joy's world, is almost like a virtual camera. We were sometimes talking about 1930s studios, very slick, precise type of cameras. With Inside Out 2's new widescreen format, we took that a step further by making the human world camera an anamorphic lens, so it has a little more texture, a little more detail.”
Ideas that weren't used in the first film got a chance to shine.
As any tour of Pixar will tell you, ideas are everywhere. Every film is the product of input from nearly countless artists and collaborators, and is polished and refined over a production cycle that lasts roughly four years per film. So it goes without saying that there are far more ideas than make it into the final version. Every Pixar film is screened multiple times in very rough storyboard form as the story is refined, so Mann was able to dig into the archives and pick up some pretty useful tips.
“Whenever I make a film here, I always have a screening, storyboard the whole film, edit it, and show it in the theater. I do this every three months. One of the first things I did was [when I started working on Inside Out 2] I watched all the screenings. [of Inside Out]I watched the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth screenings. Ideas often get cut not because they're bad ideas, but because they don't fit the story. So there are a lot of elements that were left out of the first movie that we can dig up and bring into the sequel.”
Mann also re-examined all of the art from the original film, “because there was a lot to consider, but there were also a lot of great ideas. And I'm sure some really great ideas will have to be shelved for this movie. Who knows what the future holds, but there's definitely a ton of great ideas that I dug up to make this movie.”
- Inside Out 2 will hit theaters on June 14. For more on the film, pick up the latest issue of Total Film, on sale Thursday, May 23.
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