“I love the setting of this movie, the mind of an 11-year-old girl. That feels like something fresh for me and the movie audience,” says the actress, who hasn’t slowed down since her NBC series “Parks and Recreation” ended its seven-year run in the spring.
“Inside Out,” directed by Pete Docter (“Up”), mostly takes place inside the mind of Riley, a young hockey-loving girl whose family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco. Though she tries to be optimistic at first, Riley becomes more melancholy as the distance from her old home and the happy memories of childhood become real.
As she sinks lower, it’s then up to her personified emotions — Joy, Anger, Sadness, Fear and Disgust — to figure out how to pull Riley through her difficulties without permanent damage. As a child, Joy had been the leader of Riley’s mind, but with the move and the approach of adolescence, Sadness (voiced by Phyllis Smith) suddenly begins to exert influence.
So the real action of “Inside Out” takes place in Riley’s mind as Joy and Sadness careen through a subconscious landscape of receding memories, collapsing emotional touchstones and nearly forgotten dreams.
“I love the age Riley is,” says Poehler, who has two young sons with her former husband, Will Arnett. “At that moment you are all possibilities and open-faced.”
Being concerned about the decisions faced by young girls is not new for Poehler, who in 2008 with producer Meredith Walker founded the Smart Girls organization (Amysmartgirls.com), which is dedicated to providing “a healthy alternative to so much that is being marketed to young people on the Internet.”
Poehler remembers being Riley’s age, “filled with ideas but not quite sure what I was able or capable to do,” noting that she’s lucky because she came from a stable, loving home.
While attending Boston College, she discovered improv, and it changed her life. “The feeling you can improvise is like a superpower. It’s a nice feeling,” she says, adding, “There is a certain amount of collaboration necessary for improvising because it just can’t be every man for himself.”
After graduating, she headed to Chicago where she studied at Second City, where she met Tina Fey. Then, in 1996, she joined the Upright Citizens Brigade improv and sketch comedy troupe before moving to “Saturday Night Live” from 2001 to 2008 where she worked with Fey as well as Bill Hader, who voices Fear in “Inside Out.”
The idea for the film came to Docter when he began seeing changes in his own 11-year-old daughter as she started to grow more serious. He hadn’t worked out much more than doing a story from inside a young girl’s mind when he took the idea to Jonas Rivera, who had produced the Oscar-winning 2009 movie “Up.” Despite the sketchiness of the concept, Pixar got behind the project, which took five years to complete.
In developing “Inside Out” the filmmakers consulted author and UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner, whose study focuses on integrating emotions. For a while there was a debate on just how many emotions to have, before settling on five. Anger (Lewis Black) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling) are the other two.
Docter says Poehler was the last one to be cast and it was because Joy was the most difficult of any of the characters to write for: “She had a tendency of being really annoying — always chipper and upbeat that you want the sock her.”
Poehler says she worried that Joy would get annoying, but Docter says Amy “somehow made it entertaining. She was not insufferable. We root for her.”
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