Inside Out 2’s female emotions finally get to look weird

When director Kelsey Mann took the helm on Pixar’s Inside Out 2, Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter had one big suggestion for him. Before taking that role, Docter directed many of the studio’s greatest hits, including the original Inside Out.

At an early press preview going behind the scenes on Inside Out 2, Mann told Polygon that the interior world of Inside Out in Riley’s mind was supposed to be more “cartoony” than the realism-grounded outside world. But Mann said Docter told him that the final product didn’t quite land the way he wanted.

“He said, ‘We thought we were going far with what we could do with the characters inside the mind, in terms of how broadly they moved and were animated,’” Mann recounted. “‘I think we could have gone further. And I kind of regret not dialing that up a little bit. So I highly suggest that you go further.’ I remember talking to the whole animation department pitching the movie, and saying we wanted to do that. I feel like we’ve done a lot of that on the film — I really tried to push it.”

Image: Disney/Pixar

That’s especially true when it comes to the character design. In the original movie, which centers on an 11-year-old girl and the personifications of emotions in her head, Fear and Anger have distinctly cartoony designs. Their exaggerated shapes are meant to evoke the emotions they represent. But the emotions embodied by female characters don’t capture that same feeling. Joy, Sadness, and Disgust look more generic, and apart from their bright, jewel-toned skin and hair, they could easily pass as human characters in another Disney or Pixar movie. (Joy in particular launched a significant discussion about the longtime problem of Disney Princesses all having the same face, and about Pixar following that trend, designing all its female protagonists with round faces and button noses).

But from the very first trailer, it was clear that Inside Out 2’s new emotions would be different. The sequel introduces Anxiety, a Muppet-like emotion character with a huge, stretchy mouth and big, wobbly eyes. She’s joined by Ennui, who is represented as a lazy, drooping line, and Envy, a tiny mushroom-like blob of an emotion. And there’s also Embarrassment, a huge, hulking figure who hides his big face beneath a hoodie. Already, these four emotions (three of them female) break that round-face, button-nose mold.

Image: Disney/Pixar

“That was a conscious decision that we made,” said Mann. He cites production designer Jason Deamer as the one who really brought those character-design discrepancies to his attention. “[Deamer said,] ‘Why can’t the female characters have the same kind of design sense? It’s pushed, it’s fun.’ And we leaned into that.”

“This is animation, not live action!” Deamer told Polygon. “So let’s do what animation [can] do — really push the weirdness.”

After Turning Red and Luca, which both pushed Pixar in a more stylized, cartoony direction, it makes perfect sense that the filmmakers behind Inside Out 2 would feel emboldened to embrace a less conventional look. That’s an industrywide trend that kicked off with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, though some studios haven’t been as quick to embrace the movement. But movie by movie, Pixar is slowly welcoming the new.

“The studio [is] more open to having different directors with different sensibilities coming into the fore and wanting to pursue a very specific look,” said animation supervisor Dovi Anderson.

“Audiences are now more ready for that kind of animation,” added animation supervisor Evan Bonifacio. “It’s not going to throw them to see stuff moving around in a specific way that feels pushed.”

Inside Out 2 hits theaters on June 14.