Pete Docter, Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley, Ronnie del Carmen

Inside Out's humor operates on several levels, so it seems only fitting that it took several people to write it. It's like Grandma Shmoop always said: "The more the merrier—especially when it comes to penning heartfelt animated family films that explore the complex psychology of the prepubescent brain through anthropomorphized emotions."

Grandma Shmoop was known for being folksy, but also very specific.

Something for Everyone

Written by Pete Docter, Meg LeFauve, and Josh Cooley from a story by Docter and Ronnie del Carmen, Inside Out aims its comedic sights on every single member of its audience. "There's nothing quite like hearing a theater packed with people laughing at the same gag for different reasons," film critic Matt Zoller Seitz says of Inside Out's layered humor. (Source).

Word up, Matt.

Er, we mean, yes, we concur. The script for Inside Out includes something for everyone, from slapstick hijinks for the littlest ones to clever sight gags for the not-so-little ones.

For both LeFauve and Cooley, Inside Out was their first screenplay. For del Carmen, this was his first story credit for a feature film. Docter, meanwhile, had a handful of story credits—all of them with Pixar—to his name, including Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., and WALL-E. He'd also co-written, and won an Oscar for, his first feature-length screenplay: Pixar's Up.

If LeFauve, Cooley, and del Carmen were looking for a mentor, they could do a lot worse. Inside Out earned them all an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

Where the Idea Came From

Docter got the idea for Inside Out from two different places: his family's move to Denmark when he was a kid, and the insecurities he saw his daughter stare down when she was 11.

As he told Psychologies magazine in 2015, he was excited by the idea of personifying our innermost feelings:

It just seemed very intriguing. The idea sort of unfolded in levels…the idea of personifying joy or fear or anger, that was the first attraction. Then as we got into it, we realized that we could go to these worlds that are at once familiar, but that no-one has ever seen before—where dreams come from, why songs get stuck in our head—and then the third revelation, after getting into it for a while, realizing this idea could have stronger resonance with us as people and the way we communicate…that all presented itself like an onion skin.

During the planning stages, the film featured even more feelings. An early draft featured 26 emotions, but, ultimately, sentiments like Pride, Love, Greed, and Guilt all hit the cutting room floor. Docter found that scientists simply don't agree on how many emotions a human being has, or if we have any at all:

We thought that this is science, there is going to be one correct answer to the number of emotions. But some [scientists] said 17, another said four. A couple of scientists said zero, that emotions are sort of an illusion. There was no real unity. That was good because we were able to decide for ourselves" (Source).

Fittingly, Pride and Hope held out the longest before getting scrapped. And get this: in early drafts of Inside Out's script, the emotions had names—as in, names like you and us. Fear was called Freddie, for example. Anger was called Ira. Get it? Ire-a? Because ire is a synonym for anger?

Yeah, we're glad Inside Out's screenwriters decided to go with simpler, clear-cut names, too, like Joy. And Bing Bong.