Animation

With animation, the world is your oyster. Or it's Adrastea, the second moon of Jupiter. Or it's a medieval castle surrounded by a root beer moat. Or it's the mind of an eleven-year-old girl named Riley Andersen who desperately misses Minnesota.

The point is, it can be anything. Sure, well done CGI can bring a menacing T. Rex to life or make you wish your school had a legit Quidditch team, but, with animation, there's literally nothing that a filmmaker can't do.

You Want It, You Got It

Inside Out's primary setting and main characters are unique—not just because they exist in between some girl's ears, but because they're metaphors.

Setting aside the scenes with Riley and her parents in San Francisco, Inside Out is populated by "people" and places that are visual representations of abstract thought: Joy. Sadness. The subconscious. It's animation that makes this all possible, as well as what makes Riley's mind engaging, intriguing, and familiar all at once.

BTW, it's also what prevents any of it from getting too creepy or intense. Imagine Jangles being played by Danny Trejo in a clown wig.

Shudder.

The animators at Pixar had the freedom to create a world, and the characters who inhabit it, however they pleased. Nobody knows what the feeling of anger looks like, for example; it's not a tangible thing. That means the Pixarians could represent it any way they wanted.

In the film, Anger's a short, square, red dude dressed like the manager at an auto parts store, with a gruff voice and a propensity for shooting flames out of his head when he gets really upset. He could've just as easily been a talking habanero pepper, or a singing hammer, or a—okay, you get it.

Pixar Switches Things Up

While animation is where Pixar lives, the style of art in Inside Out differs from the rest of Pixar's oeuvre. In short, it's stranger. The scenes inside Riley's mind are brighter, more colorful, and altogether more bizarre than the scenes outside that feature Riley and her parents going about their business in San Francisco, which stick more to Pixar's traditional route of animated realism.

The weird and wondrous gloss on Riley's brain makes sense, though. We mean, of course it's fantastic; it's an aesthetic representation of human thoughts and feelings. Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust are all fuzzy around the edges, for example, which suggests that they're constantly buzzing with energy, be it nervous or otherwise. They have a noticeable shimmer to them, too, which adds to their otherworldliness.

Science Fry-Day

The folks at Pixar did their research and got a few experts to be the consultants for the film to make sure that the psychological stuff was accurate (more or less) and convincing.

Paul Ekman and Dacher Keltner, psychology professors who research emotion, were approached by Director Docter, who wanted to know everything about the science of how emotions might affect the behavior, relationships, and memories of an 11-year-old girl.

Professor Keltner thinks the final version of the film got a lot of things right, even though it had to leave out lots of emotions to keep the story simple enough to be manageable. However, it did deviate from mainstream psychological theory in one important way: There isn't actually a "Goofball Island" inside your brain.

With Inside Out, Pixar tossed out their old production rulebook and adopted a new, more fanciful one, complete with psychology and a French Fry Forest. We seriously want to go to there.