http://thedissolve.com/features/interview/1075-pete-docter-on-the-goals-and-milestones-of-inside-/

Another real crucial one, we got a lot of notes that Joy was just not rootable, or appealing. We worked really hard to try to make it clear that for her, it’s all about Riley. That helped a little. And the major thing that helped was landing Amy Poehler, and talking to her about this difficulty of how to make this character rootable and interesting. She was pretty self-knowledgable, and when we met her, she said, “I think I can help you with that. I can say things that other people can’t and get away with it.” So that was a real pivot, and a step forward.

The Dissolve: Is it true that Joy was initially the only emotion with that effervescent texture, the fuzzy glow-bulb skin? Docter: Yeah, that was developed specifically for her, and then once we saw it, John [Lasseter] said, “Well, you have to make all of the emotions like that.” And we were like, “Wait a minute, can we do that? This is fairly expensive and time-consuming as a process. Michael Fong, our lead tech designer, had to go off and do some heavy thinking. The Dissolve: Why is it so much more expensive to make characters effervescent? Docter: It’s anything that strays from the normal pattern or process. The normal way is, you have your character. You model it. You articulate it. You shade it. You light it. This process added another sub-loop, where the character was built in the traditional way, but then it was removed and replaced by fog, and thousands of little discs that have a subtle movement. And then over the top of that, there’s a bloom that approximates a kind of light. It just meant that we had a different process, and had to go through a bunch of different departments to make the characters show up correctly on the screen. Once we ironed that out, it wasn’t so bad.

Mike_From_Chicago rubi-kun • a year ago The movie was actually quite clever (and cogent) about what "sadness" is, even though they never come out and say it - they basically represent sadness as the basis for empathy. Sadness is the listening emotion and also the only one that can make the character direct herself away from a hurtful (rather than overtly dangerous) situation, and it makes sense that would be the emotion that becomes more important during adolescence. It was subtle but very insightful. 3 • Reply•Share › Avatar brian miller Mike_From_Chicago • a year ago You're right on. It took Sadness to get Bing Bong out of his funk. 1 • Reply•Share › Side Item Chapman Baxter • a year ago FWIW, based on this interview and a few others he's done, I think Docter is referring to allowing Sadness, Anger, Fear, etc. their proper space to perform the roles they're evolved for. Fear keeps us from rushing into dangerous situations, Sadness allows us to regroup and work through hard times, Anger drives us to fight against injustice, and so on. Acting like those things are inherently bad and to be avoided is thus denying them the ability to perform their actual worthwhile function. 1 • Reply•Share ›