In that process at what point do you bring children in to watch a movie like this then? They’re not going to understand storyboards —
JR: Even adult audiences don’t understand storyboards.
PD: You know what, we showed it two years ago, because we were worried, particularly on this film, that it was a little complex. So we brought in audiences and I swear, kids, within a couple minutes, they totally get it. Adults struggled.
JR: Yeah, it’s really hard to show the movie, and you have to do this, unfinished. For example, the movie Up, one of the most expensive things in our business is the clothes, so we have to render this old man in this body suit, and animate it and you show it half-baked and everyone is laughing at the sad parts and no one gets it. So you get this misreads. So we’ll draw over things and try to simulate the motion picture.
But in this movie, we were worried about kids less about will they get it emotionally, but will they understand it operationally? That’s even hard to show in drawings. It was tricky, but we were surprised. We brought in our kids, friends and family, and we sat to the side and watched them watch it. It was pretty deep [into the process], we had some animation in there, and they seemed to really get it.
PD: We did a Q&A after and some of the kids explained back all of the memories, the islands of personality, and they totally got it.
So that’s got to be nice when an adult might tell you they’re not getting it and you have a few children explain it to them.
PD: Yeah, yeah, we’ve had a weird experience on this one where adults… you have a story about Italy.
“It was like the most beautiful retelling I’d heard. I was so moved, she deeply got it…” ~ Jonas Rivera
JR: When it was done Disney sent us around to some countries to test it in international markets for marketing and so forth. In Italy I’m sitting aside with this translator and listening to this Q&A after, there are three rows of kids and three rows of adults, and I can kind of tell “That’s her dad” and so forth, and it was like a five or six-year-old girl who stands up, in Italian, and she like pitches the movie back to the moderator. It was like the most beautiful retelling I’d heard. I was so moved, she deeply got it, she understood Bing-Bong, she understood the islands, that made her sad, she really deeply got it.
Anyway, the conversation goes on and a couple of the parents said, “Well, we might hesitate in bringing our young kids” and they called on this one gentleman who was the little girl’s dad and they asked him why. And he said, “Well, I don’t know if five or six year olds are going to get it.” I couldn’t say anything, but in my head I’m like, “Dude, your kid just pitched it to me beautifully!” So I almost wonder if there’s some denial from parents almost.
Was there anything that you wish could have remained in the film, but it just didn’t fit and had to be scrapped?
PD: The one, and it’s very hard to describe, but there was a very surreal scene that kind of took the place of Joy in the memory pit where she actually swum down into the unconscious. It was a very different kind of organization of the mind, we didn’t have the unconscious as the cave it was underwater and she —
It was Inception.
JR: Kind of…
PD: Not exactly, but kind of, a very ethereal feel. That was cool.
JR: Yeah, the memories were kind of like the ocean. I remember that.
PD: We had some other things, such as music.
JR: I was going to say the stream of consciousness, we had some drawing of things, it was like a river down there.
Okay, I do have to ask one thing. When it came to the core memories, why didn’t she just push those through the hole and send them back up to headquarters the way they were doing with that commercial they kept throwing on a loop?
PD: Ah ha! We discussed that along the way and it was one of those things where we kind of boxed ourselves in a corner a little bit. We added the recall thing later, when they were doing the song that got stuck in her head. Our argument was that Joy wouldn’t trust the memories would be fine on their own, she needed to be up there too.
Yeah, I was watching and just thinking to myself well she should just toss those things in there too and be done with it.
PD: Yeah, well then we wouldn’t have a third act. [laughing]
Inside Out is in theaters now, you can read my full review of the movie here.
