Kelsey Mann felt a little nervous when she was called into an unexpected meeting with Pixar executives in late 2019.
But rather than anything negative, the meeting served as an invitation to come up with ideas for a sequel to one of the company’s most successful and acclaimed features. And anxiety turns out to be key to Mann’s concept for Inside Head 2.
Mann, who has worked at Pixar for more than 15 years, earning story supervisor and screenwriting credits on Monsters University, The Good Dinosaur, Onward, and other Disney projects, says, “Anxiety and not feeling good enough” I wanted to create a story that deals with Owned animation studio. “The self-conscious feeling you get when you start comparing yourself to others as a teenager.”
The original film, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2016 and was directed by Pete Docter before he became Pixar’s chief creative officer, transports audiences to the emotional home of 11-year-old Riley. It was a cleverly drawn-in youth story. Five personified emotions, led by the always cheerful Joy, try to overcome the difficulties that arise when Riley’s family moves to a new city.
The sequel, which marks Mann’s feature directorial debut and is also credited with the story, follows Riley, a happy teenager who is now 13 years old and about to find herself in the emotional maelstrom of adolescence. Matters come to a head (so to speak) during an ice hockey training camp, when Riley’s emotional turmoil wreaks havoc as she chooses between old friends and new ones.
To simulate the turmoil of the adolescent mind, Mann first put inside Riley’s head the emotions of schadenfreude, surprise, shame, etc., in addition to the joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust of the first film. I came up with a lot of new emotions. But when the project, which followed Pixar’s famous iterative production process, passed the first of several draft reviews, he had second thoughts.
“We wanted to overwhelm Joy and her old feelings with all of this chaos,” the director explains. “So I flooded the headquarters with all kinds of new emotions. And I not only overwhelmed Joy, I overwhelmed the audience. The first note I got at the first screening was ‘simplification’. It was. So we reduced the new emotions from 9 to 4. ”
design progress
The new emotions/characters employed — a painfully shy colossal shyness, a French-accented ennui, a perpetually jealous envy, and an exhausting insecurity — went through their own development process.
Anxiety, Joy’s antagonist for much of the story, was initially “a little more monstrous,” recalls Meg LeFauve, the original screenwriter who returned for the sequel and shares a story credit with Mann. do. “We tried it, but we didn’t think it faithfully replicated our own experience of anxiety. She was a villain for a while, but it still didn’t feel real. I was reminded again and again of the fact that she has good goals, but bad plans.”
The sequel’s other screenwriter, Dave Holstein, said the challenge was “how to portray the anxiety so that it’s still a threat and an adversary to[Joy]but in the end they mesh well together.” It was about thinking about it,” he said.
In addition to character development, the screenwriters (who worked on the project sequentially rather than jointly) had to juggle the film’s three main storylines: Joy, Riley, and Anxiety. did. “It’s like three-dimensional chess,” LeFauve said.
Anxiety was also a challenge for the design team. “She went through a lot of changes,” Mann says. The character has an abstract appearance dominated by a gaping mouth and protruding eyes.
In the first film, the male characters’ fear and anger are “more emphasized in terms of design, more stylized,” Mann says. “Women aren’t pushed that far. Production designer Jason Diemer wanted Anxiety to be a female character who was just as well designed as Fear. I love the playfulness and pushiness of her design. She is my favorite because it was so difficult to get the final look.”
In assembling the sequel’s story, Mann made a list of his favorite sequels and those he considered less successful creatively, stating, “The ones I liked were new worlds I didn’t even know were there. It was an exploration of.” So for his story, “I wanted to explore new areas of the mind that I didn’t know were there in the first film, but were right there.”
The result is a journey into the depths of Riley’s mind, whose emotions are an expanded version of the first film’s Imagination Land (now including a team of Anxiety workers busily creating worst-case scenarios). It was a journey across the Sir Chasm that was inspired by the teens. Spend time in The Vault, a new location where Riley’s secrets are safely hidden.
The casting for the sequel included a fresh blend of the familiar and the new. Amy Poehler returns from the previous film to voice Joy, stand-up comedian Lewis Black plays Angry, and Phyllis Smith (The Office) plays Sad.
However, Mindy Kaling and Bill Hader reportedly did not reprise their roles from the previous film due to pay issues. Tony Hale of Veep and Toy Story 4 took over the role of Fear, while Liza Lapira of Fast and Furious took over the role of Disgust. High-profile talent cast in new roles for the film include Maya Hawke as Anxious, Ayo Edebiri as Envy, Paul Walter Hauser as Bewildered, Adele Exarchopoulos as Ennui, and a brief glimpse of Nostalgia. Includes June Squibb in the role.
There was a nine-year gap between the original film and the sequel, so it was unlikely that audiences would draw direct comparisons, so when recasting Kaling and Hader’s roles, “there was no consideration in matching their voices.” , said Mark Nielsen, who worked at Pixar for 28 years and produced Inside Head 2. A veteran who served as a producer on “Toy Story 4” and an associate producer on “Inside Head.” “We’re able to bring a lot of improvisation and comedic and dramatic weight to these roles, but still tap into that emotion and do it in a way that feels like we’re hearing fear and loathing. We were looking for a great actor who could carry that.”
As for voice recording, Nielsen reports that the project was able to complete most of its recording sessions before the U.S. actors’ strike began last July. As such, the strike did not significantly impact the company’s overall production, “apart from a few additional lines that had to be re-recorded here and there.” ”
technological leap
While the casting may have helped, the lag between Inside Head and its sequel added to the technical challenges that cutting-edge Pixar projects often encounter. “Technology has changed dramatically over the last nine years,” Nielsen explains. “The shading and lighting tools we use today are completely different, so we couldn’t just reuse the characters and sets from the first film. It took about a year to complete this version.”
Meanwhile, the 2D characters in The Vault (Riley’s childhood cartoon favorite) were a difficult starting point for a 3D project. “It was actually more difficult to do something like that in Pixar’s pipeline,” Mann says. “Anything outside of[Pixar’s]standard is a little harder because it’s a whole new pipeline.”
And the sequel’s climactic panic attack sequence was “probably the most complex thing we’ve done,” the director added. “Anxiety flashes everywhere and there’s a tornado effect behind her. It took a lot of effort to get it right.”
Of course, we were ultimately able to meet this challenge with a four-year timeline, slightly shorter than Pixar’s average four to five years. This schedule produced nine versions of the film, each of which was screened by the studio’s vaunted brain trust. In addition to our in-house filmmakers, we also included psychology experts and a group of teenage girls from across the United States (see sidebar).
This effort paid off when Disney released Inside Head 2 in June 2024, earning $295 million at the global box office in its opening weekend. By the end of the summer, the film had raked in nearly $1.7 billion, making it the biggest hit of 2024 and the highest-grossing animated film of all time (ahead of Disney’s 2019 photorealistic remake of The Lion King). exceed). Award nominations include two Golden Globe nominations and seven nominations for Annie’s.
Fans of the Inside Head universe can learn more about its characters and more in Dream Productions, the recently launched Disney+ streaming miniseries produced by Pixar about the “studio” that directs the dreams inside Riley’s head. can now spend more time with their new residents.
But it remains to be seen whether fans will be able to visit the world on the big screen again. At the Disney fan event “D23” held in August last year, company CEO Bob Iger said in a TV interview that he “would love to see Inside Out 3,” seemingly hinting at his appearance in another work. It was.
However, Kelsey Mann said there are “no plans at this time” for a third movie. But, he admitted, “A lot of people want it, a lot of people were asking about it even before this movie came out. People just want to see Riley’s life. ”Ns
Riley’s Crew: Inside Head 2 Teenage Girl Focus Group
Research groups and focus groups are part of Pixar’s feature development process, but for Inside Head 2, the studio sought input from uniquely qualified experts. For this project, a group of nine girls, aged 13 to 16 at the time, from California, Washington, and Louisiana were formed through introductions from organizations and studio employees.
The group, named “Riley’s Crew” after the film’s central character, was shown each rough cut of the sequel over a three-and-a-half year period. After each screening, the girls, who only met in person when invited to the film’s Hollywood premiere, provided feedback to the filmmakers in a Zoom meeting.
“We wanted to make sure this work resonated with today’s teenagers,” says Mark Nielsen, producer of Inside Out 2. Let’s talk about how it was utilized. “We wanted them to consider our representation of Riley and her friend group, how she feels and the emotions she’s struggling with.”
Meg LeFauve, the sequel’s screenwriter, says the girls were sometimes shy about criticizing the filmmakers’ work. That feels right to me. ”It is very important to know that. ”
For scientific guidance, the project turned to Dutcher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and clinical psychologist Lisa D’Amour, who has written about the emotional lives of teenagers.
Nielsen explains that the idea was “to help us be honest about what’s going on in our minds.” Anxiety exists for a very important reason. It exists to help you. So we wanted to get the emotions and how they were expressed right, even if some of them had to be a little antagonistic in the story. ”
Director Kelsey Mann recalled meeting with Keltner, who also served as a consultant on the first film, during the first week of working on the sequel. “I asked him what happens in your brain when you become a teenager,” he says. “He leaned back in his chair and said, ‘Oh my God, Kelsey, that’s tough.’ Where do I start? I felt like there was something substantial there, so I I was excited.”
