INSIDE OUT 2
OUT 14 JUNE
WHEN KELSEY MANN was asked to direct a sequel to Pixar’s most cerebral film, he knew the worst thing he could do was overthink it. “My original thought was to pitch three ideas,” says Mann of Inside Out 2. Then he sat down to watch the original again with its director (and now Pixar Chief Creative Officer) Pete Docter. At the end, when the emotions inside the head of teenager Riley notice a new button labelled “PUBERTY”, Mann thought, “Well, I want to see that thing go off.’” He recalls, “I explored other ideas, but I kept coming back to that. Eventually, I just pitched that to Pete.”
Inside Out had a brilliantly simple concept. Inside Riley, a pre-teen girl, are a group of anthropomorphised emotions, headed by the ever-upbeat Joy (Amy Poehler). As Riley struggles with some major life changes, the emotions have to navigate a confusing new world. For Mann, the hormonal landslide of puberty took that concept to a dramatic new level. “This is a gold mine for everything we love at Pixar,” says Mann, who made the Monsters, Inc. short Party Central and was a writer on The Good Dinosaur. “It’s got heart. It’s got emotion. It’s got humour. Puberty is hilarious, but it’s also a hard time in our lives. I want to say something meaningful about ourselves as humans, but told in an imaginative way.”