Hollywood held its breath leading up to this box office weekend, but Pixar’s “Inside out 2” delivered a resounding success, grossing $155 million domestically and $140 million internationally – the best opening of the year, surpassing even last year’s “Barbie.” Screenwriter Meg LeFauve, an oscar nominee for her work on the original “Inside Out,” returned to Pixar for the sequel, beginning work before the pandemic shifted animated releases to streaming platforms. Now, Disney and Pixar are once again drawing audiences back to theaters.
“We didn’t know what was coming,” LeFauve shared in a Zoom interview. “The only pressure was it had to be sequel-worthy Pixar. You have to explain why. Can we go to new places and discover new things in this world? And can we dig into something personal and emotional and vulnerable to share?”
The Pixar Brain Trust: A Collaborative Approach to Storytelling
Pixar’s writing process for animated features differs significantly from that of live-action films. Central to this process is the “Brain Trust,” a group led by Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter, the original creator of “Inside Out.” This isn’t a static team; it’s a rotating assembly of animators who provide feedback at each stage of development. Sometimes, industry veterans like “Wall-E” creator Andrew Stanton or “Coco” director Lee Unkrich join the discussions.
“The Brain Trust is always evolving, because it is a living thing in terms of who’s at Pixar at that time,” LeFauve explained. “Who’s working on what projects; can they take time off to come into a Brain Trust? Pete Doctor is the creative leader but is attuned to the same philosophies of a Brain Trust of getting multiple voices creatively to turn it up and give you ideas and places to look and maybe blind spots. So that has stayed much the same.”
Developing the Story of Anxiety and Adolescence
For “Inside Out 2,” director Kelsey Mann initially presented Docter with three ideas, but the concept focusing on Anxiety resonated most strongly. “Kelsey went to the personal, to himself,” LeFauve noted, “and was vulnerable talking about himself at that cusp [of adolescence]. He showed me pictures of himself when he was six and had a birthday party (‘Look at me!’) and the next birthday party, he’s getting a little bit more remote; by the time he’s 13: ‘I wish everyone would just go away.’ I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s me.’ My dad called me moody Meg. I can relate.”
A key task for mann and LeFauve was convincing Docter and the Brain Trust that the onset of puberty necessitated the introduction of new emotions – anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui – to join the existing core emotions of Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. The initial phase involved exploring the core concept. “I want to investigate anxiety, but what’s the story?” LeFauve recalled. “Pixar is all about, ‘Is this the best story?’ It’s about iteration, and it’s about fail fast. so you’re always pushing, pushing, pushing out to the edge of your creativity. They want you to fail, because then they know you’re trying for something, but fail fast, because we’ve got to get a movie going here. At the beginning we’re at that delicate stage of putting together our ideas.”
From Outline to Storyboard: The Iterative Process
Once an outline, or “scriptment,” is developed, a larger Brain Trust convenes to review the script. This process can led to significant revisions. “Those can blow up. They can be ‘we like this half,’ or ‘this coudl be the best thing ever, go forward.’ You never know what you’re going to get. But there’s always good ideas coming. From the script, you’re churning, churning, churning, and then they’re starting to draw, you have to have some character design going on.”
The team explored numerous emotions, even considering bringing back Schadenfreude from the first film. While Ennui made the cut, Procrastination Land was ultimately discarded. “Oh, it was so fun,” LeFauve said. “But it didn’t add to the story. It didn’t add to joy’s journey or Riley’s or Anxiety’s. You start to understand: we want to be with these emotions. and we care more deeply for Anger and Fear and disgust. It’s about Riley. What do we need to tell their story?”
The next step involves storyboarding, where the visual narrative takes shape. “Once you start going into storyboard,” LeFauve explained, “now you sequence it. I always know as a writer if the scene is good, because the storyboard artist is so excited to draw it. So that’s always a good day. And then you go into your screening process, and you screen the movie within Pixar in storyboard format, and go back into those Brain Trusts.”
Embracing Vulnerability and Relatability
A key decision was to focus the story on Riley’s internal emotional landscape rather than external relationships. “The main reason we steered away from focusing on boys was that ‘hormones are like a physical thing and the mind is symbolic,’” LeFauve clarified. “Pete docter created a symbolic place; it’s not chemicals and cells going by. It’s a metaphor. And we always had to be careful of that in terms of the language of the film. I didn’t want to center a whole movie around her liking a boy. Because for me, it’s a piece of that age, but it’s sure as heck not all that age. You’re moving away from your family as the epicenter to girls and friends and even the boys that you might all like and whisper about,it’s still filtering back through that girlfriend. That’s where we decided to center it.”
The film explores the complex interplay of emotions within Riley’s mind. “They’re trying, in all good faith, to construct her and decide who she is,” LeFauve said of the emotions. “I don’t think they understand that that’s what they’re doing. But that’s what they’re doing. And that’s what parents can do,sometimes; we can decide,well,‘we need to keep our kid happy,’ or ‘we need to get rid of that anxiety,’ or ‘just don’t think about that.Think about the good stuff.’ But part of finding out who you are is embracing or at least acknowledging all of those things. So for example, envy.People think, ‘Well, I shouldn’t be envious,’ but envy is telling you what you want. It’s important. And you are imperfect. And how gorgeous it is indeed that you’re imperfect. And that’s part of what makes you so unique and who you are as well.”
Beyond Pixar: LeFauve’s Diverse Projects
LeFauve’s creative work extends beyond Pixar. She co-wrote “Captain Marvel” (Marvel/Disney) with Nicole Perlman, a project she described as carrying “the weight of the world” due to the responsibility of creating a relatable female superhero. she also wrote the screenplay for the animated film “My Father’s Dragon,” based on the beloved children’s book series, released by Netflix.
Currently, LeFauve is collaborating with her husband, Joe Forte, on an action horror film titled “BackTrack” (Sony).“We’ve joined forces,” she said,“And we’re having a blast. But it’s working. And it’s upping my game.”