Uncut Gems helped inspire Inside Out 2

16.04.2024 - 15:07 / polygon.com

Pixar’s 2015 movie Inside Outextended the studio’s proven story formula to its logical end point by asking the question What if emotions had emotions? The result is a poignant, whimsical adventure that delves into the mind of an 11-year-old girl grappling with some big life changes. The sequel, Inside Out 2, picks up a year or so after the first movie — and introduces new emotions as characters, which has raised a lot of questions for Pixar fans. During a press visit to the Pixar campus, we got a first look atInside Out 2, and got to talk to the filmmakers about creating a teenager’s emotional landscape.

As Inside Out 2 begins, Riley is 13, and has adjusted to life in San Francisco with her two best friends. She’s ready to take on high school, and her familiar five emotions — Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale, taking over for Bill Hader), and Disgust (Liza Lapira, taking over for Mindy Kaling) — are super stoked to help her out. But the morning she’s set to go to an elite hockey training camp, an alarm goes off in her mind, and a group of new emotions arrives at Headquarters, where her emotions live and work.

Leading the pack is Anxiety (Maya Hawke), with Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) rounding out the crew of cringe teenage emotions. They’ve arrived to make sure Riley is set up for success in high school, even if that means overriding Joy and the rest of the emotions and taking control. Here’s what Polygon learned about the process of making the movie when we visited Pixar’s own headquarters.

Story artist Rebecca McVeigh says a story crew mostly made up of women helped shape the authenticity of Riley’s journey. She also tells us that a group of women across multiple departments on Inside Out 2 got together to share insights during production.

“We all got into a room and sat around and told each other our bad 13-year-old stories,” she says. “And it was pretty interesting how cross-generationally — because there’s people in their 60s working on this film, people in their 20s — how universal that 13-year-old experience was. We did kind of agonize over, like, Do I remember being 13 in a way that would feel authentic to a modern 13-year-old? Us all getting to share our 13-year-old experiences made me go like, Oh, no, I think it’s just the same.”

Mann says Joy’s last line in Inside Out (“After all, Riley’s 12 now. What could happen?”) inspired him to tackle Riley’s teenage era. Looking back on pictures of his own childhood, and watching his smile slowly disappear as he grew, solidified his desire to explore these turbulent years, where all sorts of big, new emotions start taking over.

“I’d zeroed in on