FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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This is your brain on Pixar

This is your brain on Pixar

The award-winning studio's latest film "Inside Out" is an animated head trip through the mind

THE LOSS OF youthful innocence is a common thread that runs through Disney-Pixar movies, from “Toy Story” to the American animation studio’s latest effort, “Inside Out”, which opened in cinemas this week.
Hitting the purple carpet for the Southeast Asian premiere in Kuala Lumpur last week, director Peter Docter and co-director Ronnie Del Carmen gave the region’s press an inside look at “Inside Out”, which deconstructs and rebuilds the mind as it takes an epic adventure with the conflicted emotions of an 11-year-old girl.
The story came about as Docter was wrapping up his 2009 feature, the tearful “Up”, which dealt with growing old. Docter’s daughter, 11 at the time, had voiced a role in that film, and the ordinarily bubbly girl had grown quiet and withdrawn. Docter, who hatched the ideas for such Pixar hits as “Toy Story” and “Wall-E” and touched on childhood fears in “Monsters Inc”, wanted to know what was going on, but felt helpless. Paternal concern fed his creativity, and he talked about his feelings with Del Carmen, whose children were already grown. Del Carmen, a storyboard artist who has helped Pixar crack the stories to such movies as “Finding Nemo” and “Ratatouille” and worked closely with Docter on “Up”, saw a chance to make a movie. 
“We thought we were telling a story about a girl growing up,” Docter told reporters. “As it turns out it was a story about two dads watching a girl grow up.”
The pair sat down to draw and write, testing concepts on each other to see what worked and what didn’t. Through the process, Docter and Del Carmen, who are office neighbours on the Pixar campus, didn’t always see eye to eye, and sometimes would take their ideas to studio head John Lasseter or executive producer Andrew Stanton.
“I was convinced a thing was wrong,” Docter said, “then Ronnie went off and boarded it, and I came in the next day ready to tell him that was wrong and – ‘Oh, that’s really good!’ You don’t know until you prove it.”
Del Carmen said the process is the key to Disney-Pixar’s success in making broadly appealing global box-office hits that are critically acclaimed award-winners.
“Creative differences are not antagonistic,” said Del Carmen, a Filipino who got his start as a teenager painting sets on “Apocalypse Now” before eventually heading to Hollywood and finding work on “Batman: The Animated Series”. “Creative differences are a way of not having the same voice all the time.”
The human mind proved to be a tough nut to crack, both in terms of a story everyone could comprehend and as something that’s visually compelling.
After turning to experts, such as psychologist Dacher Keltner of the University of California’s Berkeley Social Interaction Lab, the Pixar wizards got to work mapping it out, with Docter reminding them that they are creating the mind, not the piece of meat that is the brain.
What they created was a place where memories are colourful little balls stored away in Long Term Memory, a holding facility that looks like a library of Easter eggs or jellybeans.
The key to mapping the mind was the emotions, which, backed by science, was boiled down to five – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. They become the crew who oversee the mind’s operations from a spaceship-like control centre called Headquarters.
Bringing much happiness to the role of the star-shaped, yellow-hued Joy is Amy Poehler, who has previously demonstrated her relentlessly perky persona on TV’s “Parks and Recreation”. Poehler, Docter said, helped give the character nuance and vulnerability. Otherwise Joy would be somebody so gosh-darned upbeat that you’d want to strangle her.
Further story direction was provided by the teardrop-shaped, blue-hued Sadness, whose sweet melancholy is voiced by Phyllis Smith from the US version of “The Office”. Smith, Docter said, brought insecurity and empathy to the proceedings.
The emotions are further rounded out by Bill Hader from “Saturday Night Live” as the jangled, nervous Fear and Mindy Kahling from “The Mindy Project”, who provides the requisite amount of sass as Disgust. They are the two emotions who provide defence mechanisms to keep you from tripping over electrical cables or from eating something disgusting, such as broccoli pizza.
And, hand-picked for the role of the little red briquette of Anger, is the always-outraged comedian Lewis Black, who is still hilarious even as he tones down his usual swearing rants for the sake of the children who might be watching.
The story takes place at a crucial time in the girl Riley’s life, as she and her parents are moving from small-town Minnesota to San Francisco. The gravity of the situation – being ripped from her friends and hometown – hits poor Riley all at once, and her emotions can’t cope. Joy, Sadness and Riley’s core memories are swept away to the far reaches of her mind. Anger, Fear and Disgust are ill-equipped to control things as Riley’s personality islands – Family, Friends, Hockey and Goofball – submerge.
Along the way, Joy must learn to work with Sadness as the pair trek through such places as the Subconscious, were the darkest fears reside, and Memory Dump, a landfill that stretches as far as the eye can see, where recollections that are no longer needed fade away. They ride the Train of Thought, which duly derails. In Abstract Thought, they become Picasso-like shapes.
And, in Imagination Land, a french-fry-filled theme park, they meet Riley’s imaginary friend, Bing Bong. Voiced by Richard Kind, Bing Bong is a goofy and childish combination of an elephant, a cat and a dolphin, and he helps Joy and Sadness find their way and gives the story an emotional kick that tugs the tears.
“Inside Out” is already proving to be one of the company’s biggest successes, with earnings of more than US$600 million so far, and near-universal acclaim from the critics. Both directors had a tonne of ideas they ended up not using, so a sequel might be inevitable.
But Del Carmen said he wants to give “Inside Out” time to fix itself firmly in our collective conscious.
“It’s the hardest movie we’ve ever made,” he admitted. “We just want it out in the world, and have the world embrace those characters.”
 
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