If you haven’t seen Inside Out yet, get thee gone! Here there be spoilers.
In an interview with io9 this April, Inside Out co-director Ronnie del Carmen was asked about any ideas that didn’t make it into the movie, and shared some insight into jokes and inspirations that unfortunately had to be edited out.
According to del Carmen, the Inside Out creative team initially had plans for a “Name and Faces” department:
We had these two departments, Names and Faces. They hate each other. They don’t like to share information. Not only that, they’re called ‘Appointing Faces to Names.’ It’s kind of unreliable. So when you go to Faces, it’s like, we’ve got the faces over here and you’re like, ‘I have no problem with the face, but I’ve got to tie it to a name.’ ‘Well, that’s not my department. You want those guys down there.’ And you see them, all their shelves are kind of like, all the data is spilling out. And it’s like, ‘Thanks a lot.’ We couldn’t keep it in the movie! We loved that gag so much.
Director Pete Docter revealed that a musical cognition department was also under consideration for awhile:
When you watch your cat and there’s something musical playing, you know your cat doesn’t hear it. It’s just noise for the cat, but to us it means something. So we thought it would be fun if maybe we could represent that in some way. And Joy starts talking and then it becomes music itself. It forms into shapes and things. And that was really cool, but it ended up being really redundant with Abstract Thought.
Production designer Ralph Eggleston told io9 that Riley’s memories were originally represented by spiderwebs, rather than spheres:
They were originally in jars, I think. That’s a neat idea, but it felt very real world, too real world for such a major component of the film.
I had fallen in love with, not the regular old spiderwebs, not the Charlotte’s Web spiderweb, but the ones that look like gossamer sheets, the real dense ones. And then they have lots of minute, small teeny dewdrops. Wouldn’t it be great if that was a memory? You could pull it off. As a matter of fact, before we had shelves, they were nothing but thin threads. They weren’t spiderwebs, but they were thin threads, kind of wrapped around them [the memories] like DNA. And whenever a memory was recalled, you would hear like a whine glass ‘Eeeeeeehhhh,’ and then you would see the string gently do this [bobs fingers] and one of them would glow and it would get shot up and come right back down.
To learn more about the making of Inside Out, head over to io9.
What do you think, gang? Would you have liked to see some of these concepts in the movie? Do you have any ideas for departments or jokes that the creative team might have missed?
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