ComingSoon’s Jonathan Sim recently spoke with Inside Out 2 director Kelsey Mann and producer Mark Nielsen. The Pixar film hits theaters on June 14.
“Disney and Pixar’s Inside Out 2 returns to the mind of newly minted teenager Riley just as headquarters is undergoing a sudden demolition to make room for something entirely unexpected: new Emotions!” reads the official synopsis. “Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust, who’ve long been running a successful operation by all accounts, aren’t sure how to feel when Anxiety shows up. And it looks like she’s not alone.”
Jonathan Sim: I want to talk to you, Kelsey, about one of my favorite ideas that is in Inside Out 2, which is the fact that it combines multiple different animation styles to fill out the supporting cast. So were there any specific pieces of media that you were looking at as reference to build these characters?
Kelsey Mann: Yeah. You’re always pulling from an assortment of things. You don’t want to pull from just one thing. You wanna make sure you’re creating something kind of new and different. Usually that’s pulling from like three or four different things for inspiration. And you know, there’s a scene that utilizes different techniques of animation, which we love at the studio. And in fact, some of the ideas to even do that came from our crew. They were like, hear us out. What if we do that character in 2D? And I’m like, whoa, are you up for doing that? Because that’s harder to do and it’s more difficult. And if you’re, if you’re up for doing that, I’m up for doing that because you’re gonna do all the hard work to make it happen. And so if you’re up for that and they’re like, yeah, let me add it. ’cause there [are] so many people at the studio who have a history of working in 2D animation or in gaming too.
There’s a character who’s like a, like kind of a pixelated gaming character. And they knew and exactly what to do, how to do it. But then we have to put it through the pipeline at Pixar, which is not necessarily designed to do those looks. So they have to figure out how do we get that look in our technology in our pipeline.
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Mark, you’ve been working with Pixar for a while and I wanted to ask what was it about the first Inside Out that made the team over there really want to make a sequel to that film?
Mark Nielsen: Yeah. I loved being part of that team. I was associate producer on the first film and, man, just getting the band back together, bringing back the cast from that first film. We loved the cast, and the original emotions. And the idea of bringing them back to do another film, there was so much appeal in that. Yeah. And then Kelsey came up with just a great, really emotional idea for this second film that once we all heard it, we wanted to rally around that and bring it to the screen. ’cause we’re like, that sounds like an idea that’s worthy to be a sequel to this first film that we all loved.
Kelsey, I wanted to ask something. This is a question that I’ve been thinking about for a couple years and I think a lot of people have been wondering.
Mann: I’m intrigued, okay.
So whenever we go into the minds of other characters in Inside Out, all the emotions typically look a little bit like the person that they’re inside of a little bit. And they typically match genders, but with Riley, her emotions have different genders. They don’t really look like her. Is there a particular reason for that?
I mean really those are a lot of decisions that were made by the team that made that movie and Pete Doctor was the director on that one. Yeah. That’s probably a question best suited for him. So I was on another movie while they were making that one. But no one had ever seen the Inside Out world and how it was gonna work. Yeah. And they’re very concerned about cutting from one world to the next, like, let’s take the dinner scene from the first film. There are four locations. In that you’ve got the real world, you’ve got Riley’s head, mom’s head, dad’s head. You had to cut from one thing to another. How on earth do you know where you are quickly enough that you can keep up with it? And so they wanted to make sure that everything was distinct. So that’s why all of Dad’s emotions have mustaches. So you go mustache! Dad’s head! Glasses! Mom’s head!
It was to help tell the story and they were really concerned that audiences would get confused, but we found that they took to it incredibly faster. And it’s really a thing that we’ve benefited from because now it’s a part of the cinematic vocabulary. Like, people get it. Yeah. People get it now.
And I feel like also if you’re gonna get anyone to play Anger, you might as well get Lewis Black for it.
Mann: Yeah. Oh yeah. He is fantastic. I love working with Lewis. Yeah.
Absolutely. And I wanted to ask because Inside Out 1, I was 12 when I first watched that movie, and now, I’m here interviewing you guys. What is it about the Pixar brand that makes people want to keep coming back for more? And what kind of movies do you think that Pixar should be focusing on in the future either to keep up the reputation or build a new one?
Mann: I mean, first and foremost, it’s all about telling a really good story.
I think so too.
Mann: It’s always been that. And the other thing that’s really important to me personally and especially with making this movie, you know, Mark and I are fathers, and we’ve got kids, both boys and girls. And it’s very seldom that I can say, let’s all go to the movie theaters this weekend and see a movie together. So much of it’s like, I’m gonna go to that. You’re gonna go to that. And there’s not enough movies where we can say, let’s all go to that together and we all want to go. Yeah. And we’re all gonna get something out of it. And so those are the types of movies that we want to make at the studio, and definitely, I had on my mind making this one.