At a certain point in our lives, we all become different people. For<i> </i>director Kelsey Mann, that moment came at his 13th birthday party, and decades later, it became the heart of<a href="https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/2024/06/12/review-inside-out-2-is-an-anxious-and-hilarious-examination-of-turning-13/" target="_blank"><i> Inside Out 2</i>.</a> “When you’re making a Pixar movie, you have to make sure that you’re telling a story that’s fun, imaginative and – above all else – truthful,” Mann tells <i>The National. </i>“And so that’s where I started. I had to go somewhere really emotional, so I went back to my old birthday photos.” Mann had just been tasked by Pete Docter, the director of the <a href="https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts/film-review-inside-out-hits-the-right-notes-as-a-clever-and-powerful-film-1.26666" target="_blank">original 2015 film</a> and now <a href="https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/film/frozen-and-inside-out-filmmakers-take-leading-roles-at-disney-1.742212" target="_blank">head of Pixar Animation Studios</a>, to come up with a worthy sequel to his modern classic, which takes audiences inside the brain of an 11-year-old girl named Riley. But sequels are tricky business. How do you stop yourself from going over the same material? Mann realised they wouldn’t have to. Two years later, Riley would change completely, just as he did. “I was scanning my photo albums and I noticed that when I was five years old, I had this huge smile on my face,” Mann explains. "It stopped me in my tracks because I was so happy. It was a day to celebrate me, and I was revelling in that. “Then at 13, that smile just went away. In those photos, I’m just sitting there staring at the camera. Everyone’s singing <i>Happy Birthday</i> and I hated being sung to. I’m like, why did I feel like that? I hated that everyone was looking at me. I hated attention. “I think it’s because of the new emotions that show up. Suddenly, you’re really self-conscious. You’re incredibly hard on yourself. This ‘not good enough’ voice shows up in your head. And that’s why I wanted to make this movie – to explore that emotion and how to deal with it." <a href="https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/pixar-ready-to-step-out-from-disneys-shadow-with-inside-out-movie-1.126654" target="_blank"><i>Inside Out 2</i></a> picks up two years after the first, with Riley now 13. It is still guided by the anthropomorphised emotions from the control room in her mind. It’s the first day of her summer holiday and just as she’s set to leave with her best friends for hockey camp, she wakes up feeling like someone else. Her body smells weird. Her mood has dropped. She’s worried about things that haven’t even happened yet. When she lashes out at her parents, they suddenly don’t recognise her – and she doesn’t recognise herself either. Inside Riley’s mind, we see this play out literally. Suddenly, a group of new emotions join the fray – Anxiety, <a href="https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/2024/03/27/inside-out-2-ennui/" target="_blank">Ennui</a>, Embarrassment and Envy – casting the old ones aside. There’s a lot going on inside the mind of a 13-year-old girl. Too much, as it turns out, for a single movie to contain. Pixar head Docter explains that early versions of the film had five more emotions they were forced to cut because they overwhelmed the narrative. Docter says: “We went through a bunch of different characters that we tried out, including Guilt and Shame. We had to go through a lot of different things before arriving at just the right cocktail of ingredients so were able to tell this story.” It takes years to make a Pixar movie, primarily because of their exacting standards, Mann explains. For every film, once a script is ready, the animators create the storyboard, draw it all up, cut it together and then gather the entire brain trust to watch the film from beginning to end. “We do this over the course of many years. Usually, we do eight or nine versions, which means eight or nine screenings,” Mann explains. At a certain point, however, Mann realised that the <a href="https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/music/from-oscar-winning-soul-to-toy-story-a-musical-history-of-pixar-1.1211404" target="_blank">Pixar </a>brain trust wasn’t enough. How could they make a film about teenage girls without the feedback of actual teenage girls? “I’m not a teenager anymore,” says Mann. "It’s been a while since I’ve been one. So I thought that I would love to have a bunch of teenage experts. “I went to the studio and said: ‘Can I have a group of teenage girls that can be my advisory group?’ So we created a group, and we called them Riley’s Crew. And those nine teenage girls would watch every single screening that we did so we could get their take on it. They helped us figure out where we did things right and where we got things wrong, and we made a lot of adjustments based on what they told us.” Mann knew that he was capturing his own truth. But he knew that only Riley’s Crew could ensure he was capturing the truth of a new generation. “One thing they really helped with was being truthful in dialogue. Not having it be too ‘cringy’ was something they were really helpful with. “They’d hear certain phrasing, and they would respond: ‘Don’t say that. Nobody says that at all!’” <a href="https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts/pixar-film-inside-out-beats-jurassic-world-in-box-office-1.38290" target="_blank"><i>Inside Out 2</i></a><i> will be screening in cinemas across the Middle East from Thursday</i>
