Pixar director Pete Docter hops on the
phone one weekend in June, and the conversation easily glides to areas
of commonality. We are talking about the topography of both San
Francisco and of being (and parenting) a child on the brink of
adolescence — two of the spectacularly steepest journeys one can
experience, with enough hurtle-down hills and straining inclines to
render the trip forever memorable. So it’s fitting that in his new
movie, “Inside Out” (opening Friday), the Oscar-winning Docter shows
both the majesty of the Golden Gate and the winding peril that is
Lombard Street. In the beautifully inventive film, San Francisco is the
exterior, and the mind of an
11-year-old child is the ultimate interior.
Here is how the Bay Area-based filmmaker arrived at these twin
destinations.
THE SHIFT is sharp enough to make grown men weep.
One day your child bounces with the relatively gravity-free air of
innocence and joy. And then, just like that, a different life form moves
in, similar in appearance but not quite in spirit.
Congratulations, Dad. It’s an adolescent.
Pixar filmmaker Pete Docter knows
this road map well. It began to play out about five years ago when, as
it does for most all parents, it spurred twin, parallel sensations. “My
daughter is changing,” Docter says he thought when his Elie was 11. “She
used to have this happy, goofy spirit. But she began to move toward
being more quiet and more reclusive.”
It wasn’t just his daughter’s shift and drift that stirred his
emotions. As most parents can attest, it has a prism-like effect, a
sense of refracted duality, as you stare squarely at the present while
reflecting on your past.
“It was two things,” Docter recalls of
that time. “It triggered my own fears. I was pretty nerdy as a kid, and
things stressed me out. I wondered: ‘How do I fit in and what do I say?
What are the social things I should do?’ And then, in fifth grade, my
folks moved us [from Minnesota] to Denmark. It was all that.
“Watching
my daughter made me a little sad,” Docter continues. “As a parent, I
was playing and being a part of that ‘pretend-play.’ And that was going
away [at 11]. That was a big part of the film.”
“The film” is “Inside Out,” Pixar’s first original movie since 2012.
Docter’s five-year labor of love is his first directing effort since the
brilliant, Oscar-winning “Up.” In “Inside Out” (in theaters June 19),
the family of 11-year-old Riley moves from Minnesota to San Francisco,
and the girl must leave behind her friends and school and hockey team,
even as an unfurnished new home is cold and bare and uninviting.
Yet
Docter’s vision is not simply a tale viewed from a movie’s typical
physical perspective. The filmmaker was sparked by an age-old question –
“What in the world are you thinking?” – but he had the ability
to seek answers with new-age technology. The CGI-animated “Inside Out”
spends most of its time inside Riley’s mind, in a colorfully abstracted
place where five emotions chatter and quarrel at Headquarters: Joy
(voiced by Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and Fear (Bill Hader).
“One of the big decisions I made early on was to say that the movie
is set in the mind, not the brain,” Docter says by phone from the Los
Angeles area. “There are no blood vessels and dendrites – it’s a bit
more abstract.
“Freud and Jung and neurologists kind of break
down the mind very differently, and research for the film was
essential,” Docter continues. “This film kind of mixes the two.”
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