I was invited on an expenses paid trip to CA by Disney to cover #PixarInsideOut and #Lava in exchange for my posts of the trip experiences. All opinions are my own.
While I was in San Francisco in January I had the chance to visit Pixar Studios to get an inside look into Pixar’s new animated film coming out in June: Inside Out.
“Growing up can be a bumpy road, and it’s no exception for Riley, who is uprooted from her Midwest life when her father starts a new job in San Francisco. Like all of us, Riley is guided by her emotions – Joy (Amy Poehler), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith).
The emotions live in Headquarters, the control center inside Riley’s mind, where they help advise her through everyday life. As Riley and her emotions struggle to adjust to a new life in San Francisco, turmoil ensues in Headquarters. Although Joy, Riley’s main and most important emotion, tries to keep things positive, the emotions conflict on how best to navigate a new city, house and school.”- Pixar
First we had the chance to see a few clips from the movie including the opening of the film. I fell in love instantly! It is so cute and fun, and funny! I can’t wait to see the whole movie once it opens in theaters on June 19th.
Here is a small clip from the movie.
We got to talk with Inside Out’s Director Pete Docter and Producer Jonas Rivera.
In talking about what inspired the idea for the film Pete said it was his own personal experiences with his tween/teen aged daughter and the difficulties that come with growing up. Both from the child’s perspective as well as the parents perspective. He said “that was really the origins of this film, trying to figure out what’s going on inside her head. We had this idea of using emotions as our main character. Anger, Fear, Sadness, Disgust and Joy. And what that lead to was this great research that we got to do talking to psychologists and neurologists, and really dive deep into how and why we think and feel. And a lot of that research has shown up in the film, and then of course we made some stuff up too, but, uh, ‘cause it’s supposed to be fun to watch.”
Jonas chimed in on the topic as well “it was really that idea to personify the emotions. When we pitched it to Disney and to John Lasseter, we talked about our version of the Seven Dwarfs. We love animated movies. What was it about those classic Disney animated movies that lasted forever? Why do we still talk about Lady and the Tramp and Dumbo, and these movies that we grew up with? They’re very emotional. And so we thought, we like movies that are emotional, what if we made one about emotions?”
They talked with us about casting the character s for the film. Pete said “Casting, even from the beginning we were thinking, you have Anger, Fear, Sadness, Disgust. You have all these guys who have such strong passionate points of view on how you should act. Fear is always gonna be the one to say “Uh, maybe we should just back off a little.” And Anger coming forward and we were early on using Lewis Black, the great comedian, as an example of the kind of cast you could find. We were lucky enough to get him.
Not only do the characters lend themselves to great animation fun, but we had this amazing cast between, Amy Poehler (Joy) who’s just fantastic. Uh, and really what made me fall in love with her is her is that she does such great work in reaching out to kids and letting them know that growing up is hard. And so she really resonated with the film. As did Mindy (Disgust).”
Jonas continued on “Mindy Kaling, who plays Disgust. We pitched with all these really smart actors, and just that they responded and really have approached the film as if it’s there’s, like they’re really proud of it, as are we.”
Pete also told us a fun fact about Bill Hader (who voices Fear) “Here’s one benchmark. While we’ve been making this film, Bill Hader has had three kids.”
When asked which emotion was the favorite to bring to life Pete said “The one that seemed easiest, and I don’t know what this says about me, is anger. He was just the most fun in terms of a cartoon, you know? And I could right away know what he looks like. He was one of the first that we designed. The most difficult was Joy, because we wanted her to have depth and she’s our lead. And I don’t know if you have people, friends that are just happy all the time, you kinda wanna strangle them, you know? You just don’t believe them. We wanted to make sure that Joy had a depth and a complexity to things.”
Check out the newest trailer for Inside Out!
INSIDE OUT opens in theaters everywhere on June 19th!
Follow INSIDE OUT on Twitter, #InsideOut
Follow INSIDE OUT on Instagram: @PixarInsideOut
