The reviews are in and Inside Out looks like another major success for Pixar, but it could have been a drastically different movie. There were a crop of characters, settings, and details left on the cutting room floor. For instance, while the film prepping to hit theaters this weekend features five core emotions — Joy, Anger, Sadness, Disgust, and Fear — the animators were toying with a sixth that didn’t make the final cut.
During the press day for Inside Out that took place at Pixar headquarters in Emeryville, California, we spoke with director Pete Doctor and producer Jonas Rivera. In reflecting on all the details they had to cut from the film, chief among them was the inclusion of an emotion called Logic. As the pair explained, they chose their core emotions based on research from Dr. Paul Ekman. He discovered that there are 3-27 different emotions that can be measured and observed in a person. The team at Pixar made their main character selections from this crop. Logic, which they also referred to as Reason, was up for consideration, but he was eventually cut out of the story because his presence had unforeseen implications.
One of the biggest questions Docter and his teamed asked themselves was, "are we our emotions?" He said:
If those characters are Riley, then how can Joy love Riley? It'd be like loving your car. Part of the relationship that you have in a loving relationship is the fact that everybody has free will, so we made a conscious decision to drop Logic and make Riley separate from her emotions. Again, this is truthful. You don't choose whether you feel fearful or anger, it just kinda comes to you. What you do with that then is your choice.
Inside Out takes a peak inside the head of a young girl, Riley, to introduce the emotions influencing her life. Amy Poehler voices Joy, Phyllis Smith voices Sadness, Lewis Black voices Anger, Mindy Kaling voices Disgust, and Bill Hader voices Fear. Together they maintain Riley’s kooky personality, but things go awry when Joy, Sadness, and the core memories that let Riley develop her personality are thrown out of headquarters and into the wilderness of her mind.
As we previously reported, there were a number of other casualties in the battle to edit the story down to the necessities. In earlier drafts, Inside Out featured a number of different settings, like the hidden Secrets Vault that holds all of Riley’s secrets, Music Cognition for understanding music, and a place called Hobo Camp for all the forgotten doodles and imaginary friends Riley thought up when she was little.
