How Inside Out 2 bases emotions on science

Inside out fans last saw 11-year-old Riley – and Joy, Fear, Sadness, Anger and Disgust, aka the five central emotions at the seat of her brain – finally come to terms with her feelings in the conclusion of Pixar’s beloved and award-winning film. 2015 Oscars. In return, she received a new “expanded console” control board. A red emergency light called “Puberty” shined on it. “What is it “Coconut-berty?” asks Disgust. “It’s probably not important,” says Joy.

Two Pixar years later – or nine years in real time – Riley is 13 and puberty is proving to be very important Inside Out 2a sequel by Dave Holstein and Meg LeFauve released on June 14. Inside her now-teenage brain, four new emotions are emerging, whether she likes it or not: Envy, aquamarine and tiny in stature with large, bright eyes; Embarrassment, bright red and comically large and always (unsuccessfully) hidden behind his hoodie; Soft pasta with a French accent Boredom, or as she says, “what you would call boredom”; and Anxiety, undoubtedly the most complicated emotion of the group, with disheveled hair and arms full of luggage. (And along with those new feelings: a starry new cast of voice actors, including Ayo Edibiri, Paul Walter Houser, Adèle Exarchopoulos, and Maya Hawke.)

But don’t be fooled by the sparkle in Envy’s eyes or the raised eyebrows of Anxiety; These lovable animated characters – and everything else in the brain-based film – are actually much more complex and rooted in neuroscience than they seem. Even if kids don’t understand it the first time, the science in the film is real, complicated and correct. And to get it right, Pixar brought in professionals.

Dacher Keltner is a Stanford grad, Berkeley professor, and co-director of the Greater Good Science Center, with a great side gig as part of Inside out consulting team, alongside psychologists Paul Ekman and Lisa Damour. Dr. Keltner and Inside out writer and director Pete Docter, who also wrote the Pixar film Monsters Inc It is Above! and now serves as the company’s creative director, they initially bonded over the challenges of raising pre-teen daughters before deciding to collaborate. Keltner’s not-so-simple job? Make sure Inside outThe creative and groundbreaking story about the voices inside a child’s brain reflects real, factual neuroscience. Of course, it’s not always easy.

TIME called Keltner at his headquarters at Berkeley College for a lively conversation about returning to what it is now, in the Pixar film current era focused on sequencea franchise, how the producers chose the first five and now four more main characters, why so-called “bad” emotions can be as good as the rest, and, when she’s old enough to drive a car, what could be next Step inside Riley’s busy brain.

See more information: Pixar’s Pete Docter: If Inside Out 2 no If we are successful, we have to “radically” rethink our business

TIME: You were a consultant on Inside Out 1 & two. How did this happen?

Dr. Dacher Keltner: I taught a course on human emotions for 30 years at Berkeley – it’s my pride and joy. In the early days, before podcasts, we made course recordings and Pete Docter saw one. One day he called me out of the blue and said, “Hey, man, I’m thinking about making a movie about emotions. Come down. It went so well that he called me again Inside Out 2and here we go again.

Did some part of you think, “A kids’ movie about neuroscience? It will not work?”

Yes really. Although I come from a family involved in the arts – my father is an artist and my mother taught literature – I’m not very good at art. It was very difficult for me to imagine how Inside out it would possibly represent the technical complexities of the brain, and in fact it did not. I just do the science and answer your questions. Pete’s first question to me to Inside out was: How many emotions are there?

So… how many emotions are there?

Twenty, so I initially thought there should be 20 in the film. It was Pete who said, ‘We can’t do this, artistically, so pick five.” This interestingly reflects the science of emotions itself, which from 1975 to 1995 focused on the first five emotions of the first Inside out: Anger, Fear, Sadness, Disgust and Joy. This is the work of Paul Ekman, also a consultant on both films. The second set of emotions, now that Riley is a teenager, are much more complicated. Teenagers become very self-conscious and very interested in the opinions of others, so these more social emotions show up as anxiety, envy and embarrassment, something I have personally worked on.

What have you learned about embarrassment?

I did all this laborious and boring research into whether embarrassment is an emotion. Do you have a distinctive facial expression? Yes. Does it have a distinct physiological process? Yes, the blush. What does it do? It makes us aware of other people’s judgments. Why do we have this? Embarrassment is an emotion within a social context that protects the norms that keep people in groups. If you violate a social norm, you blush, and that blush makes people forgive you. It tells people that you are aware of social norms, you know you made a mistake, and you are sorry. Embarrassment is painful to experience, but it is essential for our social life.

And envy? Is this also essential?

Envy is a feeling you get when other people have things you want. Maybe it’s a promotion at work, or an invitation to a party, or attention at the lunch table if you’re a 13-year-old girl. Envy is when someone else has something you want and you feel like you deserve it too. But there is new research coming out of Europe that differentiates between a malicious type of envy – perhaps you undermine someone’s work or gossip about them to try to bring them down – from a more benign form of envy, in which the envious person works harder to gain that power. reward. . This type of envy can be a very good thing and has great effects. Envy in the film is not a villain, and they took great care in drawing her like this: she is adorable and has big eyes that shine.

How do you take a big, scary feeling like anxiety and make it cute and accessible for kids?

We all get very personal, first. I had a lot of anxiety for years and panic attacks all the time. But I truly believe that the moment you accept your emotion is the same moment it stops being scary. That’s when you can say, “Yes, I’m panicking because I have a difficult job to do and it’s not going well and these are all good reasons to be anxious.” Then you realize and accept that you’re just having a human response, and sure, your heart is pounding, but you’re not going to die. Having a little cartoon character that embodies all of these feelings is so great for kids to see. I can’t tell you how many parents have said, “My child loves that Anger character! He looks exactly how my son feels.

Was anxiety a particularly difficult emotion to portray in the film?

She was, because she is more complicated than her counterpart, Fear. Fear is concerned with immediate physical danger – an electrical outlet for a baby, for example – while Anxiety projects what could go wrong in the future. That’s a lot more to worry about. But your goal is to look at uncertainty and imagine potential dangers and work to avoid them. Even anxiety has a purpose; changes our mind to threats. Now, some of them are not real, but some are very real. Climate anxiety, for example, is very real, young people feel it all the time, and it’s very important. It’s part of the challenge of development, but that doesn’t make it any easier for 13-year-olds.

The last of the new characters, Ennui, seems a little obscure, doesn’t it? How did she make the cut?

Ennui will be the parents’ favorite, I think. There are certain emotions that teenagers are great at that drive parents crazy. The eye rolling, the attitude, the utter contempt – that’s Ennui, or boredom in French. By the way, I gave an outrage speech, which I think would have been great too. Teenagers are great at this and they are the ones who will change the world. Boredom is also useful, because it’s when you tune out everything else that you can engage in creativity. Boredom tells you when you should do something different. Boredom teaches you what is important to you.

If Inside Out 3 is in our future, what emotions do you want to see next?

If Riley is 15 or 16, man, that’s serious. She would be leaving her peer group and entering society, hoping to do some good. So I would bring in the moral emotions, indignation, of course, but also admiration, desire and compassion. I have taught young women for 33 years and I can tell you that they are very, very hard on themselves. They’re hard on their emotional lives, like, I shouldn’t feel this or I’m bad for feeling this way. This simply is not true. As long as you don’t hurt people, I tend to think all emotions are good. That’s the point of this film.