Director Pete Docter on Pixar's Inside Out: We had to rip it all up and start again

The film’s characters

THE LATEST acclaimed movie from the Pixar stable is set in the mind of an 11-year-old girl. Henry Fitzherbert talks to director Pete Docter and producer Jonas Rivera about putting the feelings of a pre-teen on the big screen.

YOU CANNOT accuse Pete Docter of resting on his laurels. The creative genius behind Pixar’s Up would have been forgiven for choosing a nice simple story after making that instant classic, one of Pixar’s most beloved movies, which won the Best Animated Movie Oscar in 2010. A sequel perhaps? 

Inside Out director Peter Docter, right, with producer Jonas Rivera

 Or an action adventure? Instead, Docter, 46, who joined Pixar in 1990, embarked on his most challenging and risky project yet, one which makes the story of an old man flying away in his house under hundreds of helium balloons look positively ordinary.

Inside Out is a story about growing up, the loss of innocence and the acceptance of sadness in life, set almost entirely within the mind of 11-year-old girl Riley. 

The principal characters are her emotions: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear, who reside in a spaceship-style control room in her brain.

It is, literally, a bit of a head fry. “There were plenty of times we had to rip it all up and start again,” says Docter, chatting over iced-tea in a London hotel with his producer Jonas Rivera. 

“We’d screen the film that we had spent months and months working up and go,‘that didn’t work at all, scrap everything and start again’.

”Things never got quite as bad as they did on Toy Story, Pixar’s first feature which was shut down during production and on which Docter cut his teeth as writer and animator, but there were plenty of dark moments as the filmmakers, appropriately enough, ran the gamut from elation to despair.

 Which emotions to use for starters? “We started off with a long list of emotions, some of which we hadn’t really thought of as emotions, like schadenfreude,” reveals Jonas. 

“We also had hope, pride and love but some of them started feeling like they were doubling up. We knew the film was about Joy so all the other characters had to support her journey.”

Joy is the ebullient boss of the control room, voiced by Amy Poehler, but she finds her authority slipping when Riley relocates with her family from her Minnesota home to San Francisco because of her father’s job Away from her friends, childhood home and hockey team, the perky child becomes moody and uncommunicative; Sadness rears its blue-faced head. 

 

When Joy and Sadness find themselves lost in the deep recesses of Riley’s psyche they have to make their way back to the control room before Riley runs away from home.

Some people have hailed the film as having a feminist agenda, a simple girl matures into a complex woman, but Docter and Jonas do not see it that way. “I see it more as just a character story,” says Docter.

 “I felt it’s about the stories and troubles I had growing up, they’re really similar.

 How do you fit in and who are your friends?” That said, their research showed that girls experience emotions much more intensely at that age than boys. Jonas explains: “I don’t remember the exact data but one of the interesting reports we read said that girls aged between 11 and 17 are the most socially aware creatures on earth. 

They’re able to pick up cues that no other creature at any age can.” Then there was also Docter’s own experience as the father to an 11-year-old girl, Elie, who is now 16.

“I remember my daughter coming home and she was all in a funk because she said her best friend didn’t like her any more. My interpretation was that she was so sensitive and overly aware that she interpreted this very small, probably mistake, as a big intentional slight.” 

The filmmakers may not have a feminist agenda, although Jonas admits there are too few films with female main characters, but Docter does think young girls are under pressure to be perennially chirpy and play down their intelligence. “I think society wants and values perkiness and positivity and to some degree a bit of airheadedness.

 You’re almost punished if you’re too smart which is so tragic. It’s awful.” Embracing sadness is an important lesson of the film, “life doesn’t always co-operate” says Docter, but the filmmakers are keen to distinguish between a healthy dose of the blues and depression.

“Sadness is actually healthy and has a purpose,” says Docter. “Depression is an illness that is not understood fully.” That said, they did toy with the idea of introducing “Depression” as a villain although the film actually has no villain, Joy is both protagonist and antagonist. 

“We experimented with having a villain and that was Depression,” reveals Docter. “It was a malevolent blob that grew and this darkness descended over everything. “It gave Joy something to fight against but we didn’t really know what it was.

The science couldn’t tell us what causes depression. And how do you defeat it? It’s very sad and mysterious for people with long-term depression so we got rid of it.” Pixar and depression? That may have been a step too far even for such an innovative company; now owned by Disney and run by founder John Lasseter. 

As it is, Docter’s boldness has paid off with rave reviews and record box office: more than £193.5million ($300million) earned in America alone since its release last month. Nevertheless, you cannot please everyone.

Some have complained that by portraying Sadness as a bit of blob, the filmmakers are feeding into negative stereotypes about fat people; Joy by contrast is tall and willowy. The truth, says Jonas, is that Sadness took her bulbous shape from a teardrop while Joy’s features took their cue from that of a bright, pointy star. “We didn’t think about physical traits, we just thought about shape,” says Jonas. 

“People can think what they want but we didn’t think of Sadness as a ‘fat’ person.” I n any case, adds Docter, if they had made Joy rotund people would have criticised that. “That is a cliche, the jolly larger person.

No matter what you do, people will find cause for upset.” Mild controversy aside, the acclaimed picture has more than lived up to the standards of Docter’s Up, which he co-wrote and directed, and prior to that, Monsters Inc, which he made in 2001. He can’t ask for more than that. “For me the most important thing is to do something new and surprise people and if it truly is new then it will live on its own terms and won’t need to be compared to anything we’ve done in the past.”

Inside Out is in cinemas now.