Pixar 'Up' to its old tricks in 'Inside Out'

THOUGH PIXAR is the closest thing in the movie business to a can't-miss studio, there has been grumbling recently that the company's been playing it safe.

Pixar spent the first decade of the new century releasing completely original titles, seven in all, then started living off the dividends of sequels - "Toy Story 3," "Cars 2," "Monsters University."

Nit-pickers wondered: Had the company lost its nerve?

If so, they've gone to the right fellow to get it back - Pete Docter, the animator who helmed "Up," the movie that concluded and perhaps capped its great 2000-09 run.

No one can say Docter is playing it safe with "Inside Out," a boldly imagined animated feature that goes inside the brain of a sad, struggling girl, and breaks her emotions down into individual characters - Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust, Sadness - all trying to manage the girl's mood.

It's a fantastic voyage into the recesses of the human mind, and one that is not always reassuring - suggesting, as it does, that the movie's human character is at the mercy of a struggle occurring in recesses of her mind.

"Inside Out" has plenty of lighter moments, but it ain't "Cars 3."

"It's funny," Docter said. "Audiences are able to observe Pixar in a way that we are not observing ourselves. We don't experience it that way. We have all these ideas going forward at the same time, and some of them happen to be sequels. There may be a sequel coming out, but at the same time, everybody at the company knows we have another three originals in the mix."

Docter and producer Jonas Rivera stopped in Philadelphia to talk about the movie. Rivera said nobody at Pixar is getting rusty or complacent.

"We [his Pixar team] jumped immediately right on to this film from 'Up,' so we don't really know anything else. I think we try to swing for the fences every time."

Certainly they take a mighty cut in "Inside Out," the story of a happy, friendly Minneapolis girl who moves with her parents to San Francisco, and has a hard time adapting.

The movie goes inside her head, where characters representing Joy (Amy Poehler) Anger (Lewis Black) Fear (Bill Hader) Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith) work the levers and panels of her brain.

"Inside Out" has familiar Pixar contours. It's framed as an odyssey, with cliffhangers and action beats, and lots of comedy.

Still, Pixar walks a fine line - fear and sadness are within hailing distance, after all, of anxiety and depression.

"Depression is interesting, because we did toy with having depression as a kind of malevolent bad guy," Docter said. "But we did away with it. We didn't want to trivialize it. It's a sickness. It's not an emotion. Depression is not sadness. Sadness - and this is part of the point of the story - is helpful. It's a necessary part of existence."

Docter and others spent a lot of time researching the study of emotions, talking with psychologist-authors Paul Ekman and Dacher Keltner. They found little agreement about how to define emotion (love is not an emotion but a "state of being"), or how many emotions there are.

"Depends on who you listen to," Docter said. "Even last year there was something from the University of Glasgow, where they tried to measure emotional response in a clinical way, with sweat, body temperature, blood pressure and so forth. They decided on three - joy, sadness, anger. Ekman had identified six, but since then he's gone on to say there are at least 16 separate emotions. Other guys go up to like 27."

Animators have practical considerations.

"In the end, we just said look, there no way we're going to write for 27 characters, and there's no way audiences are going to be able to keep track of them," said Docter, who settled on five.

One thing psychologists and scientist did affirm: Pixar was on the right track by choosing to make the story about a girl.

"All of the psychologists we did talk to agreed that there is no creature on earth more socially attuned and aware of emotion than 11- to 17-year-old girls," Docter said.