Cody Englander
Staff Writer
The lead creatives behind Pixar’s “Inside Out” have slightly different takes on emotions. For the film’s director, Pete Docter, the main character of Riley can be compared to his own daughter — she was a major inspiration for the emotional maturity of the film. The voice actor behind the character of Anger, too, shared his own emotional journey.
“In my lifetime, until I was 40, I didn’t even know there were emotions,” said Lewis Black.
At 10:45 a.m. Monday in the Amphitheater, Chautauqua Institution celebrated comedy and artful performances with Week Two’s Chautauqua Lecture Series “Comedy Now: A Week Curated with Lewis Black.” Black, Docter and Kelsey Mann — the director of “Inside Out 2” — discussed the the development process of the two movies.
“It’s good to be back here, a place that would be idyllic except you all think too much,” Black said, opening the lecture.
Black is a comedian who has been a regular guest at Chautauqua Institution since 2017. He voiced Anger in both “Inside Out” and “Inside Out 2” and introduced both films at screenings at the Chautauqua Cinema on Sunday.
Docter, also the chief creative officer of Pixar, has been working with the company since the release of “Toy Story.” Under Pixar, he’s been nominated for four Academy Awards, winning three.
Mann has worked for Pixar since 2009, beginning as a story artist. His feature film directorial debut “Inside Out 2” released last year.
Docter began the panel by showing the beginning of “Inside Out.” His daughter is the voice of the young girl who opens the film and inspired the film’s concept.
“She was a lot like that character in real life, always running around and playing, full of energy and pep,” said Docter. “And then she turned 11.”
During the development process of the first film, Docter went to Paul Ekman, a psychologist and pioneer in the fields of emotions and facial expressions. This is where the original five emotions came from.
Ekman also noted what stirs these emotions: Anger is triggered by injustice; Fear is triggered by uncertainty; Disgust is triggered to avoid poisoning; Sadness is triggered by loss; and Joy is triggered by benefits.
To make these characters work for the audience, the crew needed to get the right actors.
“We were well into the project, and people would say, ‘I hate Joy,’ ” said Docter. “We went to Amy Poehler and that turned things around. She really unlocked that character.”
For Black, he was worried “Inside Out” was not going to be any good early in the process.
“The first script that they sent me, I said, ‘Did Disney read that script?’ because I read that script and was like, ‘I’m going to be in the first flop that Pixar has ever made,’ ” he said. “From there it evolved, and literally within weeks, I got another script, and they had already gone way beyond that.”
The first movie ends when the main character of the film, Riley, is 12. For the second film, Mann wanted to begin when she was 13 when puberty would start. He developed four new emotions for the story. The first new emotion was Embarrassment. His foil was Envy, a smaller character that embodies teenage self-consciousness. Next was Ennui, a feeling of boredom.
“I wanted Joy to feel out of place, and I thought it would be funny to have a character that is a little more advanced and speaks two languages,” said Mann.
The inclusion of Anxiety was one that was important to Mann and offered a way to connect with the audience.
“I started January 2020, and even at that time, anxiety was on the rise in teenagers, especially teenage girls,” said Mann.
Anxiety was included as the main antagonist and added a chaos element to the concept of puberty. However, the original antagonist in early drafts was Shame.
“What you want to have is an element of something that’s relatable, but sometimes it can feel too dark,” said Mann. “We ended up cutting this character because it was just too dark.”
Schadenfreude was a character that finds happiness in others misfortunes, but he was ultimately cut from both “Inside Out” and “Inside Out 2,” though Mann joked he’d be in “Inside Out 3.”
The developmental process for animation takes a long time, allowing for many versions of many characters, often taking as long as five years to develop a Pixar movie from idea to screen. Docter noted the hardest part of the process was fleshing out ideas, an undertaking done before getting to the script phase.
“We start with the concept,” said Docter. “Pitch to some friends. We do our whiteboards and start with a small treatment, which is about 20 pages. We usually do a few versions of that before we lock into something, and we get it approved. Then we do scripts.”
Docter works on two to three versions of a script for a movie before having a solid feeling on it.
“When a character really works, what’s fun is you can turn them on in your head, and they do the writing for you. I can hear Lewis Black in my head as I’m writing the lines,” Docter said. “That’s when you feel like, ‘OK, I’ve really got a great handle on the character here.’ ”
Casting actors who are writers themselves or talented at improv can help to elevate characters, according to Mann. They are able to get direction and run with it.
After writing, Docter moves onto storyboarding, calling it the comic book version of the final film. This version of the film, which is around 90 minutes, is screened for test audiences.
“Then, once that’s done, we go up to this room where all the people tell us how bad it sucked,” said Docter.
The movie is screened for test audiences around seven to nine times, making changes each time before heading into voiceovers and then animation.
Before casting, oftentimes Docter will listen to just audio from movies to find a voice. “We don’t know who these actors are,” said Docter. Audio will be played with someone numbering each of the candidates.
“ ‘Here is Actor One,’ and you have the voice, and you’ll be like, ‘It doesn’t seem like it works.’ ‘Here’s Voice Two.’ ‘That sounds like it’s coming out of that character. Who is that?’ Then they do a grand reveal, so we try not to be tempted by the star power or whatever,” Doctor said. “We just try to find voices that really fit with the design of the characters.”
Using an example from “Toy Story 3,” Docter showed the process for voiceover work in animation and how different takes are stitched together to create the best-sounding line. In the clip, one line from Tom Hanks is revealed to be from a handful of different recordings.
“Each beat is a cut. The reason is to finesse the performance and really get everything we want out of it,” said Docter. “That’s generally why we record one actor at a time.”
Black introduced clips of his co-stars Poehler and Phyllis Smith in the recording booth, who play Joy and Sadness, respectively.
“It’s always fun, especially working with amazing comedians because they just give you so much more,” said Docter. “We write a bunch of stuff and usually every line we do a bunch of alternate lines, so Lewis will humor us by doing five or six different things.”
In the Q-and-A section, the panel was asked about any potential for a third film.
“I won’t deny we are playing around with some ideas,” said Docter. “It’s too early to talk about anything, but we all know our lives are full of emotion, so there’s a lot of things to choose from. How’s that?”
When asked about the box office, Docter noted that he is the first audience. He wants to have the desire to work on the project if he’ll be on it for five years.
“I don’t really think about box office,” said Docter. “I think about the audience.”
A few of the questions circled around the social impact of the films, such as how it has stimulated mental health conversations and provided tools to teachers.
“It’s a wonderful gift to work on these films,” Mann said. “I can’t tell you how many times people have come up to me and told me how much these movies mean to them.”
