It was only when Pete Docter was 25 years old that he started thinking seriously about the monsters living under his bed. Docter was working on Toy Story, the first feature-length film to be produced by a fledgling computer animation studio called Pixar, when he came up with an idea for a film he thought he’d like to direct.  It would be about a man who was about to turn 30, but was still pestered by bogeymen who had been hiding in his bedroom since he was a child. Each one would represent a particular unaddressed fear or trauma from the man’s childhood, and as he found the courage to confront them in turn, they’d pack their things and move out.  One lunchtime, Docter explained his idea to Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft, two fellow Toy Story writers, who were momentarily stunned. It was ingenious, obviously, but also unnerving, and more than a little Kafkaesque: as the premise for a mainstream children’s movie, therefore, it needed some work. So for the next few days, the trio kept tinkering with the concept in spare moments, planning to pitch it to John Lasseter, the director of Toy Story, when they felt they’d got it right.  After a week and a half of talking in circles, Docter was struck by a thought. What if the 30-year-old man was the monster, and the things he was scared of were children? Docter quickly redrafted the plot, switching the real and monster worlds around, but keeping its central premise intact: the mess and chaos of childhood intruding on an ordered adult life.  He pitched it to Lasseter, who started beaming broadly – and within a few weeks, the film had gone into production. The idea, which became Monsters, Inc and went on to gross more than £350 million, had been perfect all along. It just had to be turned inside out.  Spool forward 21 years and the same sense of reckless innovation that defined Pixar’s early days is back. The past five years at the studio have been a creatively conservative period – their output has consisted of three sequels (Toy Story 3, Cars 2 and Monsters University) and the Scotland-set fairy-tale Brave, which Lasseter put into production before Disney’s 2006 acquisition of Pixar for £4.1 billion.  Docter’s new, third film, Inside Out, breaks away from that. His original pitch, which reportedly drew another one of those cheek-stretching grins from Lasseter, began as follows: “This is the story of an 11-year-old girl called Riley. But she’s not the main character, she’s the setting.”  He explained that the film would be an adventure, played out across Riley’s mental landscape – in her long-term memory, dream-life and imagination, and the deep caves of her subconscious. Its heroes would be her emotions: specifically Joy and Sadness, who would learn they were allies rather than opposites, and that realisation would usher Riley out of childhood.  Docter, who’s now a 46-year-old father of two, had come up with the idea when his own daughter, Elie, had turned 11 – and the intrepid young girl who had inspired her pint-size namesake in the heartbreaking prologue to his previous film, Up, had become moody, listless and completely unreadable. Every day he found himself asking the same question: “What is going on inside her head?” Making this film, he concluded, might be a good way of figuring that out.  I meet Docter in the main conference room at Pixar’s Emeryville campus, just across the bay from San Francisco. Like many animators – including Lasseter, Aardman’s Nick Park, and Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki – he looks like one of his own creations, with a long, angular body which sprawls like a badly folded deckchair, and a hyper-expressive face.  He enjoys retelling the pitch story, with its neat autobiographical hook. But the metaphysical wrangling that followed, he stresses, was far messier. “The initial idea made me wonder: what is any of our happiness actually trying to accomplish?” he says. “What does it say about us on a deep, human level, that we want to squash down our other emotions at the expense of this one?”  It took two and a half years of writing and rewriting, with the help of Pixar’s in-house Brains Trust – a panel of artists and writers who carry out open-heart surgery on one another’s ideas, without anaesthetic – until Docter knew exactly what he wanted Inside Out to be.  Along the way, he and his co-writers met a number of psychologists: one was the body language expert Paul Ekman, who suggested that seven emotional characters, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Disgust, Surprise and Contempt, would be needed to fully articulate Riley’s inner life. In the interest of neatness, Docter delegated surprise to Fear and contempt to Disgust, bringing the lead cast to a neat five. The last thing he wanted was for Riley’s head to get overcrowded.  Conceptually, Inside Out is far more audacious than, say, Cars 2 – although that doesn’t seem to have hurt it at the US box office, where it has just taken $91 million in its first weekend, the biggest opening for an original (that is, non-franchise) film in history. While Docter says his film wasn’t a conscious attempt to push back against Pixar’s recent run of sequels, he admits that he has “less patience” than others at the studio for revisiting ideas that he feels have already been explored.  “John [Lasseter] has this amazing love and commitment to the characters and worlds that he’s developed in Cars and Toy Story,” Docter says. “But for me, when the movie’s done, I have this sense of relief that I can put it away.”  He talks about being surprised at his own lack of anxiousness over the Monsters, Inc prequel, Monsters University, with which he had almost no involvement – “I didn’t feel this deeply personal ‘Argh, my babies!’ attachment, which was interesting,” he says – and recalls watching part of Up the previous week for work reasons, and realising he hadn’t so much as thought about the film for six years. “I guess different brains work in different ways,” he shrugs.  With the release of Toy Story in 1995, Pixar launched the computer-graphics revolution, and other animation studios, including Disney, scrabblingly followed suit. The result was that the hand-drawn side of the industry – in the movie business, at least – went into hibernation.  Two decades later, Inside Out may signal the coming thaw. The real-life scenes with Riley and her parents were all animated in the traditional Pixar method, using intricate digital models, the application of complex algorithms to describe things like light and reflection, and a serious amount of digital processing muscle.  But for the interior scenes, with Joy, Sadness, Anger and the rest, the approach was completely different. For those, the great animator Tony Fucile – a key figure in the Disney Renaissance of the Nineties, and a lead artist on The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and The Lion King – sketched the characters entirely freehand, using the “rushes”, or basic, first-draft versions of scenes, as backdrops.  Fucile’s drawings were then used to refine the characters’ expressions and movements – and for extra guidance, he also ran weekly seminars in which he picked apart classic Looney Tunes and MGM cartoons frame by frame, so that Pixar’s younger animators might better understand the form’s capacity for energy and play.  Officially, this makes Inside Out the first Pixar feature to use the art-form the studio almost accidentally extinguished, and the difference is as unmistakable as it is indefinable. Jonas Rivera, Inside Out’s producer and a seasoned Pixar-ite since the Toy Story days (he joined as the studio’s first intern), describes it as “that feel… that magic trick that loosens things up a little bit”.  Rivera remembers being amazed by the warmth of the character animation in Disney’s Tangled, a snappy retelling of the Rapunzel story, which had been similarly authored by Glen Keane, another veteran of the studio’s Nineties glory days.  After the 2006 buy-out, Tangled was Disney Animation’s first serious commercial hit, and the film provoked a surge of intrigue, and no few pangs of jealousy, in Pixar’s airy corridors. This, after all, was the first CGI feature that Lasseter had made from scratch with their one-time competitor, where he was now spending half of his working week. (As part of the deal, Lasseter became Disney’s chief creative officer, and one of his first acts was to put Tangled back into production; his predecessors had cancelled it the previous week.)  “The merger definitely provoked a mix of emotions,” says Docter, who’s about as old a hand as Pixar has: he was headhunted by Lasseter at the age of 21, when his (hand-drawn) short films screened at an animation festival that was also showing the studio’s first Oscar-winner, Tin Toy.  “On the one hand, all of us grew up loving Disney,” he says. “And my immediate thought was: does that mean we get a Silver Pass to the parks?” (It did – and also access to the Walt Disney Archives in Burbank.) But Lasseter’s new duties meant his Pixar colleagues no longer felt like the favourite sons and daughters.  In fact, when the announcement was made, Docter and Rivera were on their way to Disneyland in Anaheim for the grand opening of a ride based on Monsters, Inc, which, in retrospect, felt bittersweetly apt. But in a break from press duties at the park, Rivera remembers turning to Docter and marvelling at the deeper implications of the deal.  “You know, we’re now working for the company Walt Disney started in the Twenties, and we got here on our own terms,” he said. It started feeling less like they had reached an ending than an interval.  “People often ask me if Disney came in and threw down the rules,” says Rivera. “But the first thing we did after that was pitch Up, which is by far the strangest and most exoteric movie that’s come out of here.” Make that the strangest and most exoteric until now.  It’s easy to forget that Pixar’s status as an animator’s dreamland was hard-won in its early years, when the industry saw computer graphics as something to draw company logos with and not much else. These days, its reputation as a creative hotbed is a vital part of its image, and there’s something a little theme-park like about the gleaming atrium of the studio’s Steve Jobs Building, where every nook and coffee table is abuzz with discussion, perhaps of future projects even more ambitious than Inside Out.  In fact, at the very moment I walk in through the front doors, a surprise birthday party is in progress: employees are singing and carrying a cake towards its laughing recipient, and the air is crackling with good cheer. The timing feels impossibly convenient, like the well-groomed families that line the streets of Pyongyang for the benefit of tourists.  It hardly needs to be said that Joy seems to reign supreme here. Yet when I see Inside Out for the first time that evening (a month later, I watch it again at its Cannes press screening, where it’s widely hailed as one of the best films the studio has ever produced), I can hardly stop myself from sobbing throughout.  It’s not because the movie is sad – in fact, it’s extraordinarily funny, with a fizzing energy that few family films can equal – but because of its acute respect for sadness, and the way it dares to recognise that it can brighten a life just as easily as darken it. One of the very best things a film can do, after all, is make us cry.  Inside Out is released in UK cinemas on Friday July 24
A film set inside a little girl's brain is the animators' most emotional journey yet. Meet the minds behind Inside Out