“It was not fun to watch. It was not fun,” director Kelsey Mann says of the deleted characters.
“Make room for new emotions” is the tagline for Pixar’s Inside Out 2 — but there was only so much room inside Riley’s head. Now 13, the teenager (Kensington Tallman) is experiencing some new emotions: Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser). Along with the original Emotion Headquarters crew — Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Tony Hale), Disgust (Liza Lapira), and Anger (Lewis Black), all returning from 2015’s Inside Out — the sequel originally planned to introduce a whopping nine new emotion characters.
Among the cut emotions: Shame, Guilt, Jealousy, and Schadenfreude. The grey and glum Shame “was always part” of the movie — until she wasn’t, director Kelsey Mann told TheWrap. Producer Mark Nielsen added that Shame “was a tough character to redeem.”
“It was not fun to watch. It was not fun. It was too heavy,” Mann explained. “You know when you see a good movie and you’re like, ‘Man that was a great movie.’ You want to see it again? ‘No, not really.’ There are movies like that.”
Mann continued: “I don’t want to make that movie. I want to make a movie that’s really meaningful and when you’re asked, ‘Do you want to see that movie again?’ You say, ‘Yes!’ Because those are my favorite movies. And those are the kinds of movies I want to make. And I did not want to return to that movie with that character. It’s not that funny.”
With the help of psychology professor Dacher Keltner, who consulted on Inside Out 2, the filmmakers realized that Shame isn’t a real emotion. Instead, aspects of the character were folded into Anxiety, a more relatable and less-heavy feeling.
“It was like, What are we trying to say?” said art director and character designer Jason Deamer. “Shame is a real thing in life but not everybody goes through that. But anxiety is in all of us. It’s just better. I think it’s a more important thing to talk about than some kind of message about don’t shame yourself. It was preachy. Anxiety, you need it. It’s not 100% bad.”
He added: “There’s elements that are still there. This movie has always been about dealing with the feeling that you’re not good enough. And we still that element, that shame element in there, less of a character that’s really hard to watch.”
Inside Out 2 is only in theaters June 14.
