InInside Out, the characters inside 12-year-old Riley's mind -- Joy, Anger, Sadness, Fear and Disgust -- look pretty solid. But look closer and you'll see they're made of tiny energy particles, constantly fizzing around them. "They roil a little bit, kind of like sparklers," says production designer Ralph Eggleston. "That was the idea for Joy, effervescent and sparkly. So we came up with the idea of Champagne bubbles, that's what she would be made of. And [Pixar head] John Lasseter saw it and said, 'That's great - put it on all the characters!'"
Pixar has always pushed the boundaries of animation. The company's first feature, 1995's Toy Story, changed CGI forever, and has since brought to life landscapes and textures in startling new ways. But for Inside Out's mind worlds, which range from the caves of Subconscious to Abstract Thought, realism was off the agenda. "As the line has blurred between visual effects and computer animation, the latter tends to lean towards realism," says producer Jonas Rivera. "Even the metric the audience uses: 'Wow, that looks real.' And we're like, 'We don't want to make things look real.' We wanted to do something you could only do in this medium."
Much inspiration came from classic mid-20th century animation: the work of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, and classic Disney. "Seeing the early character designs," says animator Victor Navone, "I thought, 'Wow, that's much more cartoony and stylised than anything we've done before - we have to up our game."
To do that, they went back to the drawing board, bringing in artist and animator Tony Fucile, who worked on Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry cartoons in the 80s and 90s, as well as The Little Mermaid, The Lion King and Ratatouille. "As our sketch artist, Tony gave us that level of hand-drawn design so we knew where to push it to," says Navone.
Fucile drew over the top of the computer-generated works in progress. "Pete was after a sense of draughtsmanship," says Rivera. "And Tony's an amazing hand-drawn animator. We knew we could make it feel physically correct but we wanted to go further than that, push the curves and stretch out the limbs, really have impact. So as Pete was directing the animators, Tony would draw right over the shot, and we hopefully retained some of that. In 101 Dalmatians and Robin Hood, where you feel the drawing... that's impossible to do in our medium, because it's a [computer] model, but drawing over it helped loosen it."
Inside Out is out on July 24.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
