Article Response: "Going Inside “Inside Out” with Pixar Producer Jonas Rivera"

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    Ever wonder what's going on inside someone's head? Inside Out, an animated film created by Pixar, shows just that. Five different emotions, Joy, Disgust, Sadness, Anger, and Fear all live inside the mind of Riley, a young, human girl. The film shows each of the emotion's jobs, what they do for Riley as she grows up from an infant to an 11 year old, and how they each affect the way she perceives things. Recently, Toonzone News interviewed Jonas Rivera, the producer of Inside Out and other Pixar films, about the movie and its inspirations.

    Conveying emotions so that they're easy to understand for the viewers wasn't a simple task. In reality, human emotions tend to blend together, for example, you can be both angry and disgusted at the same time. However, Jonas explains that the complexity of emotions are a bit more one-to-one when you're a kid, because there are things you haven't experienced just yet, so they took advantage of this by having each emotion learn something throughout the story. In the end, all of the emotions learn that it's better to work together, which is how the creators were able to convey the blending of real life emotions. Because of this, each emotion goes through some kind of character development in the movie, especially Sadness and Joy. They're complete opposites, yet, in order for Riley to learn from her mistakes, they both needed to be present.

    In order to make the movie both cartoonish, yet, realistic, they had to do a huge amount of research on the human brain and how emotions actually work. Research is usually required for anyone working on a project - like filmmakers, animators, writers, artists, etc. You need to know a lot about a certain subject if you want to make your project realistic. Likewise, if your film is going to be released worldwide, you also need to know the cultures of different countries, and make sure you include them in it if at all possible. For instance, during the broccoli scene in Inside Out, baby Riley was disgusted by the thought of eating the green vegetable. This is understandable for kids living in the US, however, kids living in Japan don't think broccoli is disgusting, so the joke wouldn't work. Instead, the animators had to create another version of the scene where Riley is disgusted by bell peppers. 

    This article was really interesting to read, especially since Inside Out is one of my favorite Pixar movies. The amount of time, research, and work that went into this movie really shows, and it's what made it such a success. It's not easy to convey something as complicated as human emotions, but they were able to do it flawlessly and made it easy to understand, especially for the audience it was directed towards (mostly children, since it's a kid's movie).