Pete Docter’s inspiration behind Pixar’s mindful ‘Inside Out’? This one goes to 11.

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.”