CHICAGO -- Pete Docter, native of Bloomington, Minn., tall and animated, looked wide-eyed around the lobby of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry earlier this month, and above the cacophony of schoolchildren, shouted: "Do they still have the fetuses?"
A reporter said he couldn't hear him.
"The fetuses?" Docter said. "Do you know if they still have the fetuses? They used to have fetuses. And like, body slices -- thin slices of people? I remember those, too. And a coal mine exhibit you would descend down into." He turned to Jonas Rivera, his old friend and colleague, and explained, translating a Chicago tourism mainstay into something more California-relatable:
"The mine is kind of Disneylandish -- but no, more like [an amusement-park ride] at Knott's Berry Farm."
Rivera nodded.
It had been a long time since Docter had been to the museum -- not since he was a child on one of his family's cross-country summer trips in their lime-green Volkswagen Camper named Sweet Pickle. He's 46 now, with his own children, and the last 25 years of his life had not afforded time to return: Docter was the third animator hired at the animation studio Pixar, where he started in 1990, co-authored WALL-E, served as head animator on Toy Story, developed A Bug's Life, directed Monsters, Inc. and Up (for which he won a best animated feature Oscar in 2010). He found himself in Chicago recently, on a promotional tour for Inside Out, his latest movie as a director, which, like much of his work, gives shape to abstraction.
It's set in the mind of an 11-year old Midwestern girl whose family moves to San Francisco; at the controls are an anthropomorphic Joy (voice of Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith of The Office), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Anger (Lewis Black) and Fear (Bill Hader), navigating a pastel wonderland, an early '60s graphic-design landscape, of twirling cogs and memories encoded on what look like marbles. These are rolled into place, some into long-term vaults, some disappearing into a dark pit (the subconscious); amusement parklike personality islands perch precariously over memory dumps, imaginary childhood friends (Richard Kind aka Bing Bong) wander about abandoned -- as ethereal a vision as you can imagine from Fellini, as digestible as anything from Disney.
Docter is much less conceptual, quite concrete, 6 1/2 feet tall, with huge ears and a head so long that you imagine yourself inside not the Enterprise-like command center of Inside Out but rather a soaring cathedral dome. He unfurled a museum map, stood in the center of the lobby, pointed backward toward the front entrance, situating himself. It was a free-admission day and kids swarmed, hustling past in shrieking tides. Docter aimed himself in the direction of the how-your-body-works exhibits and moved to an elevator.
Stepping out on the next floor, he faced the long, gnarly ribbon of a human digestive system. Rivera, a longtime producer at Pixar, flinched: "Reminds me of that pork chop sandwich from earlier," he groaned.
"Jonas is not so into the, uh, body stuff," Docter said, then looking around, added: "I'm not so sure I remember this, but this" -- he glimpsed a dark room, of prenatal specimens -- "is where the fetuses are."
Rivera, uneasy, followed behind.
"That's six weeks," Docter said, leaning into the illuminated jars, amazed. "I remember for a while people would get upset by this exhibit, but there are natural miscarriages here." Indeed, all were donated in the late 1930s, collected by the pioneering physician Helen Button. "And that's ... you're looking squirmy, Jonas."
"No, it's just ... these are real," he said, "which means each probably has a tragic story behind it, you know?"
They moved on to a display of nerve strands, preserved in plastic, topped with a brain. Docter pointed to the folds and dark valleys of the chalky-looking specimen. "Do you see the wrinkles? That is millions of years of evolution, of the brain folding over itself to allow for more surface [in the skull] -- which gave us some inspiration for cavernous places in the movie. Deep inside is the amygdala, where long-term memory is stored, kind of deep down, deep center. But we made a decision: The film is set in the mind, not the brain. And emotions are driving things, which led to discussions -- are these five emotions meant to be the kid?"
"Long, long discussions," Rivera said.
Long, long story short, the human body is complicated.
Visualizing our internal, chemical synapses, in an accessible, dramatically coherent fashion -- that's even less for the faint of heart. Docter and Co. found ways to echo the connectivity of the mind in the cable-car tracks and designs of the Bay Area; they figured out a way to steer the film away from earlier, more Sadness-soaked versions of the story; they learned how to introduce depth to the relentlessly upbeat Joy; they even managed to pare down 27 different emotions and feelings -- at various stages in the movie's development, optimism, pride, ennui and even schadenfreude stood alongside Joy and Sadness -- to five emotions. "But we also spent a year hunting for the right metaphor for this mind," Docter said. "Was it like a ship with an engine room? Or a theater stage with a proscenium? At one point the control panel was very nuts and bolts, with the emotions working heart rate and body temperature. That didn't quite feel right."
"Sometimes things were just too on the nose," Rivera said. "Pete worried just naming a character Joy would pigeonhole the writing. Like it would become a film where characters say, 'Come on, Fear. Don't be afraid!'"
They wandered over to the display case of a dissected body, its meats and cheeses flayed and assembled so that the carcass appeared much taller and alien than it actually was, its body exploding outward and up.
"Wow," Rivera said.
"You can stomach this?" the filmmaker asked.
Docter stuck his face to the glass and said: "I never liked computery interactive stuff at museums. I like physical stuff." He worked his gaze around the display. "I remember when I was a kid they had a sign-up sheet here, for you to donate your body to science." He laughed. "I didn't do it. But this is remarkable ... Looking at this, I think about back bacon. Which I had yesterday. And I think about my free will. Because we are basically hunks of meat, and looking at this person, where is the soul? Where is the us in all of ... that?"
"Remember when we wanted logic to be a character?" Rivera asked.
"That's right," Docter said, turning from the display. "This character, Frank. He worked in the ... head office." He shrugged. "Frank, logic, would be like, 'We're not getting anywhere listening to these emotions, guys! They're a mess!' But having logic started to make it feel a little like the girl in the film was a robot in a way. So we would sacrifice science for story."
He spotted the sliced people nearby.
"This is what I'm talking about," Docter said, moving to one of the museum's oldest exhibitions (recently restored and back on display), human specimens cut very finely, like cold cuts. He pointed to a slice of brain and said, "The amygdala is about ... there. Though we think of the film, in a way, happening in the frontal lobe." He was annoyed with his description. "That's simplistic, that's why I like it's set in the mind."
Rivera examined the slices: "[Weren't] there some original Pixar renderings -- when they thought Pixar technology could be sold to medical companies -- that passed through slices of body? Kind of like this?"
Docter nodded.
A Disney publicist, tagging along, looked on with a face of disgust: "Looks like prosciutto to me."
A group of schoolchildren flooded the room. Docter watched them with a fatherly delight and said his kids were in their late teens now, but when they were younger he would take them to museums and "sit to the side and just sketch people." They moved into a room of planes and trains, and, as if on cue, Docter nodded at a woman straddling the front of a19th-century steam engine -- the type of moment he would sketch.
He continued: "Really, the movie started with my daughter, Elie, 16 now, but when she was younger, she was like these kids, running around, full of energy. Then at 11, she seemed to be more of a teenager in a way, and it was a huge change from us getting on the floor to play. She wasn't as silly, and I guess I began mourning that loss of her childhood. But then trying to hold on to childhood is the start of a lot of great art."
MovieStyle on 06/26/2015