Kelsey Mann was scanning some outdated photographs when he got here to a collection of images from his childhood birthdays and was struck by what he noticed.
“I was 5, and it’s my birthday, and I’m sitting there in front of my cake … I think it was the smile and the joy on my face that made me stop,” says the director of “Inside Out 2.” “I’m like, ‘Wow, I am really enjoying the hell out of this moment.’ Then I turned 8, and my smile went down. I turned 11; it went down even further. Then 13, and I’m just staring at this cake, wishing I was anywhere but there.
“So I thought, ‘What the hell happened?’ ”
“Inside Out” had been an enormous hit for Pixar in 2015. The comedy about 11-year-old Riley’s feelings, led by Pleasure, struggling to seek out steadiness inside her grossed greater than $850 million and gained the animated function Oscar. Naturally, with a sequel in thoughts, the studio’s writers had been persevering with to learn the way the thoughts works.
“A lot of us [were] doing the research of what goes on in the brain — suddenly, I — ‘Oh, I understand what I was doing,’ ” Mann says of the change in his photographs. “This is the time when you become really self-conscious and compare yourself to others. … I hated the attention. I just wanted it to be over. So that feeling of not feeling good enough is where a lot of this began.”
“Welcome to Pixar,” says “Inside Out 2” co-writer Dave Holstein, to laughter from Mann and co-writer Meg LeFauve, over a video chat. “We start at the emotional core and we think, ‘What’s the saddest possible thing?’ ”
They snort once more, however that is the studio that traumatized us all with the opening sequence of “Up.” And for “Inside Out 2” — additionally nominally a comedy — they had been steeped in one of the crucial terrifying circumstances: puberty. Within the sequel, now-13-year-old Riley is doing nice, enjoying hockey with good associates. Her now-united feelings, led by Pleasure (voiced once more by Amy Poehler), are nurturing her growing Sense of Self. Then a complete squad of recent feelings, powered by the frantic vitality of Nervousness (Maya Hawke), arrives and throws the whole lot off kilter.
Holstein says, “When Kelsey was discussing that seed of this idea, I think the question that came up for me was, ‘What happens to joy as we get older?’ ”
LeFauve says, “Perfectionism and anxiety taking over at that age is something that we could all relate to … [but] it also had to be fun. You want to be true and authentic to the research and human beings,” she says of wanting the movie to be related to teenage ladies like those within the story.
However with all of the enter from totally different locations and the totally different plot threads involving Riley’s struggles to slot in at hockey camp, Nervousness’s misguided makes an attempt to assist, exiled Pleasure’s quest to return and restore steadiness and all of the “balls in the air” and “three-dimensional chess,” as LeFauve places it, Mann would preserve coming again to the central concept: “ ‘What’s the story? This is about Joy.’ ”
“There’s a real ‘Inception’ quality to writing an emotional arc for an emotion inside someone else’s head while thinking about it in your head,” Holstein says with a chuckle. “So it is like three-dimensional chess, but played on a Chinese checkerboard during a game of Clue inside a dishwasher.
“The first movie, to me, was Joy discovering the power of Sadness,” Holstein provides. “And this movie, for me, had to be Joy discovering the power of Joy.”
They didn’t must go far to seek out topics for analysis. Throughout COVID-19 closures, they bought to see children up shut daily at residence. However LeFauve didn’t even must look that far to get began.
“I suffered from anxiety as a teenage girl,” she says. “So I was very much drawing from my own experience and how isolating that can be, especially in all the social things going on. As an adult, I found the solution of asking Anxiety to take a seat and to say, ‘I’m not going to die.’ ‘Give her a job.’ I do want teenagers to know you can ask anxiety to take a seat. It really does work. Give her a job. She needs a job. It’s not a piece of yourself you can cut out or get rid of. When I have my anxiety, I say, first, “Thank you. I know you’re trying to protect me.” She’s part of me. She’s a component I would like, however you may sit. I’m OK.”
LeFauve had different private expertise to depend on as effectively. “I have a son who has anxiety, so he would constantly be telling me about the projections of the future, and ‘What if?’ It helped to give him the clarity of, ‘But is that happening?’ It’s what Joy is saying in that sequence. So a lot of the sequences came from my experience as an anxious teen and adult and as a mom with an anxious teen.”
Usually, the adults discovered from the youngsters. Mann says his daughter’s leanings towards perfectionism have triggered her some nervousness.
“A lot of what my daughter has been able to learn, I’ve been able to learn from and put in the movie — the whole panic-attack scene at the end,” he says. “[Riley’s] having one and starts to come down out of it; she’s using her senses in order to ground herself in the present. … It’s a technique I learned through my daughter.”
Holstein, who says he had a speech obstacle as a boy, says that multiplicity of views was key to the movie’s success (“Inside Out 2” is the highest-grossing animated movie ever, with almost $1.7 billion worldwide, and holds a 90 constructive ranking on Rotten Tomatoes): “It works on two eyelines. The kid in me wanted to tell the story of that stuttering kid who got hold of his anxiety and the adult in me wanted to tell the story of not wanting to see the joy leave my 7-year-old son’s face after every birthday cake.”