MAKING OF
Total Film heads to Pixar Animation Studios to get inside the heads of the filmmaking team behind Inside Out 2, the sequel to one of the most acclaimed animated movies of the past decade. With new emotions, bigger locations and the onset of teenage angst to explore, this promises to be another mind-expanding, deeply felt interior adventure.
it’s perfectly teed up, right?!’ says director Kelsey Mann of sequel Inside Out 2, which takes its cue from emotion Joy’s final line in the 2015 original: ‘After all, Riley’s 12 now,’ says Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler). ‘What could happen?’
That’s the question that Mann and his team are looking to answer in this summer’s sequel, which finds Riley, aged 13, dealing with puberty, hockey try-outs and a brace of new emotions.
‘Kelsey and I are both fathers of teenage girls which made exploring this stage in our children’s lives really meaningful, and actually really helpful,’ says producer Mark Nielsen when Total Film visits Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California (not far from the San Francisco setting of Inside Out).
We’re shown the first 30 minutes of the film in one of Pixar’s screening rooms, and also tour the Steve Jobs Building, with its vast atrium designed for casual colleague mingling. Concept imagery decorates the walls here, giving much of the space a gallery-like feel and showcasing the absurd levels of imagination that go into a movie like this, while filmmaking team Mann and Nielsen, production designer Jason Deamer and director of photography Adam Habib talk us through the sequel.
‘[Really good sequels] actually expand the world, and build upon it, and open new doors in the world that you didn’t know were there,’ says Mann. So join us, then, as we embark on a (literally) mind-expanding tour of Riley’s innermost thoughts…
EMOTION CAPTURE
With the teenage years come unfamiliar emotions, so it was inevitable that some new characters would join Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. ‘I wanted new emotions to show up, but I wasn’t sure which ones,’ says Mann. ‘I made a whole list of all these options that I could do. I remember being drawn to Anxiety, and I kind of circled it, and I thought, “I think there’s something here.”’
Also joining the fold are Ennui, Embarrassment and Envy (Nostalgia also popped up briefly in the footage we saw). ‘I knew that I wanted to deal with more complex emotions coming to Riley’s console, in addition to all the emotions that we know and love with the first film,’ says Mann. ‘They’re going to have to deal with new emotions coming upstairs to headquarters.’
ANXIETY MAYA HAWKE
‘We do [the voice casting] blind where we don’t know who the actors are,’ says Nielsen. ‘And, man, the second we heard Maya, and it was clips pr
