Inside Out - Production Development

When Pete Docter’s family moved to Denmark, he felt as if he was being judged by his peers and would spend most of his time alone drawing, which ultimately lead him to animation. He did not settle in as well as his siblings did after the move. He started noticing similar shyness from his daughter, Elie that triggered a lot of his own insecurities. Pete started to imagine what was happened in the human mind when emotions start to set in, and eventually the idea to depict it in a movie excited Pete. He began researching information about the mind and consulted Paul Ekman, a psychologist that that studies emotions. Paul identified 6 basic emotions –anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy and surprise. However, Pete disregarded surprise, stating it was similar to fear.

Due to the success of Pete previous film, Up, Pixar allowed him to direct another film with a more sophisticated storyline. Pixar executives −though admitting that the film will be hard to market since it lack input from John Lasseter, the chief creative officer of Pixar Animation Studio, Walt Disney studios, and DisneyToon Studios, and Steve Jobs, who always added in opinions before his death in 2011− were positive about Inside Out’s proposal.