Inside Out: Meet the Little Voices Inside Your Head

By Erin

*I was invited as a guest of Disney to attend the press junket for purposes of this post*

Have you ever wanted to meet those little voices inside your head? Or do you ever look at someone and wonder what is going on inside their head? Well, in Disney-Pixar’s fifteenth film, “Inside Out” examines this very thought of what goes inside our head as we witness firsthand the turbulent mechanisms and dynamics of the five primary emotions driving an eleven year-old girl’s mind. At a recent press junket in Beverly Hills we were able to do just this as we got to sit down and chat with the creators and cast of Inside Out.

Director Pete Docter, Producer Jonas Rivera, and cast members Amy Poehler (“Joy,”) Bill Hader (“Fear,”) Mindy Kaling (“Disgust,”) Phyllis Smith (“Sadness,”) and Lewis Black (“Anger”) joined us for some very emotional fun, topics ranging from emotions, to Pixar, to Islands of Personality.

First we chatted with Director Pete Docter and Producer Jonas Rivera. Both have been with Pixar for over 20 years, and their love for creating movies shines through in Inside Out.

So how did the idea of “Inside Out” come to be?

Pete Docter  noticed that his daughter was going through some very emotional times, like all pre-teens do. She had just turned 11.

“I noticed my daughter growing up, being a little less goofy and wacky and funny and a little more shy and quiet because she had turned 11.  And at the same time, I was looking at different ideas for a film and thought about emotions as characters. The basic pitch that I gave to Jonas at first, and then ultimately John, was, “What if we have an 11-year-old girl who’s moved across the country, but she’s actually not the main character; she’s the setting, because inside her head are her emotions that help her deal with everyday life?” It was pretty much just that simple of a concept.  I didn’t really have a story yet.  That came from working with Josh Cooley and Ronnie del Carmen, all the amazing story talents that we have.  It slowly developed over the next four years.  But we all kind of know that, that it doesn’t have to be perfect.  We’re gonna make a lot of adjustments and refinements as we go.”

How did there come to be five emotions to go inside the head, rather than six or four?  Is there a mathematical reason for that?

Pete explained to us: “I pitched optimism, which is, we learned later, not really an emotion, and joy. I had fear and anger and some other ones, and we realized, man, we don’t really know anything about this.  So we did a lot of research, and that’s where this came from.  There is no consensus amongst scientists about how many emotions there actually are.  Some say 3; some say 27; most are somewhere in the middle.  We realized, well, we get to kind of make this up. We arrived at five, mainly because it’s a nice odd number.  It felt like a good crowd, enough contrast and conflict between them, but not so big that you’re, like, “Wait, who’s that again?  Schadenfreude?  Okay.  Lost track of −” so, if we were to represent all 27, I just − my brain was hurting, thinking of writing for all these characters. We ended up at these five, largely because of the work of Dr. Paul Ekman, who was one of the consultants on the show.  And he had originally, back in the ’70s, posited six.  It was our five, plus surprise.  And we felt surprise, as a cartoon, is probably fairly similar to fear.  So we jettisoned that one, and that’s how we ended up with the five.”

Do Pete and Jonas deliberately start out to make movies as a team or purposely like to make people cry?

Jonas had this to say: “We don’t sit around consciously going, “All right. Let’s make a great movie.” I mean, we hope that happens, obviously, but I think it’s just like, “What do we wanna see? What did we love seeing when we were kids? What do we wanna take our families to? What are we gonna be proud of? Let’s aim for that.”

Next, we had a hilarious chat with the voices inside the head of Inside Out.

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