FILM · 2015 · USA
Inside Out
- Directed by
- Pete Docter
- Runtime
- 95 min
- Studio
- Pixar
44 archived facts 3 topics 1 source Last reviewed Sep 2026
When 11-year-old Riley moves to a new city, her Emotions team up to help her through the transition. Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness work together, but when Joy and Sadness get lost, they must journey through unfamiliar places to get back home.
Summary: TMDB
All facts (44)
- #001
Inside Out was green-lit in October 2009 after director Pete Docter observed his daughter Elie becoming more quiet and reserved and wondered what was happening internally.
- #002
Ronnie del Carmen, previously a story supervisor on Finding Nemo (2003) and Up (2009), was invited by Pete Docter to serve as co-director of Inside Out, a role he accepted.
- #003
For Inside Out, the filmmakers drew on their own personal histories and consulted psychologists and specialists, including psychologist Paul Ekman and Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, to ensure accuracy.
- #004
During development of Inside Out, roughly 27 emotions were considered, among them irritation, envy, greed, gloom, despair, depression, love, schadenfreude, ennui, shame, embarrassment and hope, before the number was cut back for simplicity.
- #005
Paul Ekman provided a list of emotions for Inside Out—anger, fear, sadness, disgust, contempt, surprise and happiness—and Pete Docter dropped surprise because it resembled fear, also removing contempt; happiness was renamed Optimism and eventually Joy.
- #006
According to Pete Docter, John Lasseter was for a time less involved day to day with Inside Out and other Pixar films as he balanced running Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, but Lasseter agreed when Docter, after more than two years, said the film was not working and proposed swapping Fear for Sadness as the emotion joining Joy on the main journey.
- #007
Inside Out was Pixar's first original film made almost entirely without studio co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in 2011; its development lasted five and a half years and it was produced on a budget of about $175 million, with Pixar production designer Ralph Eggleston calling it the hardest and longest film he had worked on.
- #008
Pete Docter recruited a small team to develop the narrative and design the characters of Inside Out within 12 months, with the film's multilayered technique as their main challenge.
- #009
Del Carmen cited his upbringing as a significant influence on Inside Out and proposed making Riley an avid ice-hockey player because the sport is popular in Minnesota.
- #010
Screenwriter Michael Arndt spent a year on the Inside Out script before leaving the project in early 2011, and was credited with providing additional story material; Josh Cooley and Meg LeFauve were credited as screenwriters alongside Pete Docter for its rewrites.
- #011
Half of the story team on Inside Out were women, at a time when the animation industry was largely made up of men.
- #012
Pete Docter treated Riley as the setting of Inside Out rather than a main character, and chose the lead emotion to be female because Riley is a girl.
- #013
More than three years were spent refining the dinnertime scene in Inside Out so it would not grow stale for audiences while the story and humor held up.
- #014
Inside Out's design team explored additional directions for Riley's personality after Pete Docter grew concerned about Joy's displeasure.
- #015
Designer Albert Lozano envisioned Joy as tomboyish and mischievous.
- #016
Amy Poehler contributed to writing Joy, showing a wide range of happiness after difficulties.
- #017
With LeFauve's assistance, the team conceived Joy as vulnerable and intangible, describing her as "unapologetically positive".
- #018
During development of Inside Out, an early draft had Riley wanting the lead role as a turkey in a Thanksgiving Day pageant, but Pete Docter considered the plot idea too unfamiliar and looked for a replacement.
- #019
Several drafts of Inside Out were considered, including one in which characters developed ideas after falling into "Idea Fields" and another in which Bing Bong gathered a large entourage of exiled characters from Riley's childhood.
- #020
Richard Kind described his Inside Out character as "the fading of childhood" once the film's development had progressed.
- #021
In October 2011, Diane Disney Miller persuaded Pete Docter to cut down on distractions in Inside Out and give the story new priority, after which Docter settled on the concept of personality islands to unite the mind world's geography with the story.
- #022
Inside Out entered production in 2012 following several screenings and suggestions, and was evaluated after three months.
- #023
Editor Kevin Nolting said that seven versions of Inside Out were created before production began.
- #024
Balancing Inside Out's tone was difficult, including how viewers responded to Joy's cheerful nature while feeling negative about the mess Joy manipulates in Riley.
- #025
Producer Jonas Rivera credited Amy Poehler with developing aspects of Joy's nature in Inside Out.
- #026
Pixar filmmakers held an evaluation screening of Inside Out in July 2012.
- #027
An early version of Inside Out centered on Joy and Fear becoming lost together, but Pete Docter found this problematic and replaced Fear with Sadness, giving Sadness what he considered a "much juicier" role.
- #028
Pete Docter decided that Joy would learn from Fear as a way to develop her characterization, before choosing to integrate emotions and relationships in Inside Out.
- #029
Because the altercation between Joy and Sadness left Inside Out without its emotional ending, Pete Docter changed a scene in which Riley separates from her friend, and the Islands of Friendship and Personality became outings for Joy and Sadness to preserve continuity.
- #030
During storyboarding for Inside Out, 27 sequences and 178,128 outlines were developed, of which 127,781 remained when the process was completed.
- #031
According to Cooley, Inside Out went through 10 plot rewrites and 10 unabridged scenes of Riley's mind.
- #032
Early storyboarding for Inside Out weighed Riley's character arc more heavily than her emotions, though Rivera felt the balance came to roughly 75 percent inside and 25 percent out.
- #033
Inside Out's principal characters were cast in August 2013.
- #034
Voice recording for Inside Out started in 2013 and concluded in 2014.
- #035
Casting for Inside Out prioritized actors whose personas matched those of the characters they voiced.
- #036
Because Inside Out's cast featured multiple Saturday Night Live veterans, the production team spent a week at that program to research a live television sequence.
- #037
Phyllis Smith was the first of the emotion characters in Inside Out to be cast, while Amy Poehler was the last.
- #038
Phyllis Smith and Amy Poehler each took part in three voice-recording sessions for Inside Out.
- #039
Phyllis Smith was initially worried about voicing a role in an animated film, and she recognized her natural voice after her first recording session.
- #040
After Phyllis Smith traveled to Pixar's headquarters in Emeryville, California, Rivera cast her as Sadness upon watching a lunch scene from Bad Teacher (2011), telling Docter he believed they had found the character.
- #041
Richard Kind was Pete Docter's ideal pick to voice Bing Bong in Inside Out.
- #042
For Bing Bong, Richard Kind aimed to capture a similar sense of innocence to what he had brought to his earlier Pixar roles.
- #043
Pete Docter described Bing Bong as something that grew out of the characterization of Joy.
- #044
Richard Kind based Bing Bong's personality and look on Oliver Hardy, Jimmy Durante and John Candy, drawing especially on Candy's work in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987).
Sources & editorial notes
Reference databases
Sources for the entries on this page
- Wikipedia Inside Out — Wikipedia
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