If you thought the five emotions in Riley's mind in Pixar's "Inside Out" gave you one wild ride, Director Pete Docter just revealed that it could have been wilder. Docter said that the "Inside Out" production team reached up to 26 emotions they had to choose from before they narrowed it down to the five we know of today.
Some of the emotions that were axed already had concept designs prepared for them like Irritation, Depression, Envy, Shame, Love, Hope and Guilt, but some were only ideas such as Pride and Ennui. Ennui, by the way, is a feeling of dissatisfaction borne from the lack of excitement.
"We thought that this is science, there is going to be one correct answer to the number of emotions," Docter said. Little did he know how wrong their assumption was because the scientific community did not have a definite answer either. However, instead of getting confused, the "Inside Out" team took advantage of the situation since it meant they had full control over their production.
The narrowing down of emotions mostly had to do with the attempt to preserve the story's simplicity so Docter struggled with choosing emotions at first. "I just remember sitting at my desk and saying, 'OK, I'm going to have to make a call. Which emotions feel instinctively like the ones appropriate for the story of this girl?" Docter said, explaining how he came up with the final five.
Docter also mentioned that the last of the emotions to get cut from the list were Pride and Hope. Docter and the production team, along with Producer Jonas Rivera also considered Love in the beginning but, after consulting with psychologists, decided to make the cut. "[Love] is not an emotion -- love is a state of being. So there's all kinds of things. We were really schooled on what is and isn't an emotion," Rivera explained in an interview.
You can watch the special feature on the emotions that didn't end up on screen in the "Inside Out" Blu-ray and DVD.
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