Pixar unveils secret behind “Inside Out” at Annecy Animation Fest

PanARMENIAN.Net - Until last month, when Pixar finally released a synopsis for the toon studio’s 15th feature, precious little was known about “Inside Out”, which takes place entirely inside the mind of an 11-year-old girl. But after director Pete Docter’s stunning presentation at the Annecy Intl. Animation Film Festival in southern France, one thing is clear: “Inside Out” will forever change the way people think about the way people think, Variety reported.

As Docter explained to a packed house of animation professionals and fans, though this is by far the most high-concept project Pixar has ever undertaken, it started from a very personal and relatable place.

“It’s based on a strong emotional experience I had watching my daughter grow up,” says the “Up” director, who noticed that when his daughter Elie turned 12, much of her childhood joy disappeared, and she became more moody and withdrawn. “There is something that is lost when you grow up” — and the film became a way to explore that change on an emotional level.

The film centers on a young girl named Riley Anderson, “one of those kids who seems like she was born happy,” Docter says. “In truth, Riley is not our main character; she is our setting.” To demonstrate what he meant, Docter screened the first five minutes of the movie, a good segment of which was still in a pencil-drawn storyboard state. (The finished film will open June 19, 2015.) Sure enough, “Inside Out” takes place in Riley’s subconscious, where a crew of anthropomorphized emotions manage how the girl feels at any given moment from a control panel that looks something like the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise.

In the team’s research, they found many different scientific theories on how the mind works, including one from expert Robert Plutchik that defined eight primary human emotions, which Docter narrowed down to five: Fear (Bill Hader), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Joy (Amy Poehler), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and Anger (Lewis Black) — “like our version of Walt Disney’s seven dwarfs,” he jokes.

These distinct color-coded characters help Riley to process new experiences and to make memories, which are constantly being recorded within brightly colored orbs that look something like those translucent bath-bubble balls (filed away nightly and then erased in long-term storage by “Forgetters” with a vaguely Minions-like vibe). Once the clip ended, Docter explained that Riley and her parents relocate from a quiet rural home to San Francisco at a particularly impressionable age, resulting in a new-school trauma that forces Joy and Sadness out of the control panel and into the far, unfamiliar reaches of her mind.

While Fear, Disgust and Anger awkwardly try to keep things under control — as illustrated in a second clip set around the family dinner table — Joy and Sadness put aside their differences and take audiences through a tour of Riley’s thinking process. This epic road trip entails crossing such areas as Imagination Land (“a giant amusement park full of everything Riley has ever daydreamed about”), a movie studio where nightmares are made, the Train of Thought (a free-ranging locomotive that can go zooming off in any direction) and Abstract Thought — the zone Docter had the most fun translating to the screen.

“I was pretty certain someone must have done an idea like this before,” Docter told Variety after the presentation. And yet, “we’re approaching it from a poetic viewpoint. It’s not even trying to be scientific at all.”

The system depicted in “Inside Out” is both intuitive and slightly retro, recalling such educational filmstrips as “Our Mister Sun,” whose “Gateways to the Mind” installment depicts a little man asleep at the controls. And yet, Docter and his team pushed to find a fresh metaphor that would be totally understandable to all audiences. “One of the big things in this film has been simplifying and making things ‘gettable,’” he says.