Ronnie Del Carmen never thought he would become an animator.
"A lot of lucky things happened!" the Filipino said cheerfully during our exclusive interview. Del Carmen might be rather modest, however, as the 55-year-old worked hard to make his way from an art college in Manila to a San Francisco powerhouse, and he's just co-directed one of the best reviewed films of the year: the colourfully animated Inside Out, which opens in Thailand next Wednesday.
A brainchild (literally) from Pixar Animation Studios, Inside Out stars not humans or animals, but five emotions -- Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust, visualised as bright characters -- housed at their headquarters inside the brain of a pre-teen girl, Riley. The film, conceived by Pete Docter with Del Carmen alongside, is a triumph of original storytelling, exhilarating braininess and moving reflection on how the girl -- or her mind -- responds to the happiness and anxiety of the world. Inside Riley's head, Joy (Amy Poehler) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith) get lost from their command centre and wander through many different sections of the cerebrum -- the long-term memory, imagination land, etc -- while cantankerous Anger, Disgust and Fear are left to control the girl's day-to-day emotion.
Del Carmen came to the project early as the storytelling partner of Docter (the director of Up and Monsters, Inc.). The Filipino, who has worked with Pixar since 2000, relates how the filmmaking team sought advice from numerous brain experts in the process of writing and visualising the inner workings of a person's mind, and how they tried to come up with a story that's at once serious, complex, playful and honest to the joys and frustrations of a young girl. At the centre of it all, he said, is perhaps the philosophical question that has nagged us all for a long time. Are we our emotions, or are we more?
"The concept of emotion, even for adults, is kind of nebulous," said Del Carmen, speaking in a plush suite of the Hotel Carlton during Inside Out's premiere in Cannes. "That's because we never 'think' about our emotion. For the film, we tried to put all the learning that we got from consulting with experts on the mind, which is this -- we're not our emotions. Human beings have this primitive response to the challenges in the world in order for us to navigate our lives, so we have this system built in to react to the world. If you feel that you need to be defended, you get angry. You're not conscious of that, because you just try to defend yourself.
"But here's the thing. You can choose what you can do with that feeling. So in the film, aren't Riley's emotion hers? No! But we have volition, and while Riley's emotions -- joy, sadness, disgust and so on -- try to make her feel certain things, Riley has to choose. She can choose."
It sounds complicated, but Inside Out's achievement is how it finds a visual language and representation that captures the essence of our cerebral mechanism -- and in a way that both adults and children can follow, Del Carmen adds. The way we feel and choose to feel is intertwined with the concept of memory, imagination and the interaction of those abstract qualities.
"Where do memories get stored in our brains? The experts we consulted told us that memories aren't in any specific part of the brain, but they activate the different parts of it," Del Carmen said. "For our purposes, we put memories in a transparent globe so we can handle them easily. And the experts say, 'That's not bad, that's more concise than how we can explain it!'.
"But [the different parts of the brain] have to be dependent on what story we're trying to tell. In the film, the short-term memory is the headquarters because it is with you during the day. Only when you go to sleep, your short term memory goes to sleep."
But do we only have the five emotions that the film features? Joy is manifest here as a blue-haired pixie, while Sadness -- her opposite and yet her best friend -- looks stunted and fittingly laconic. Anger and Fear are male, while Disgust is a haughty green queen. In writing the script, Del Carmen said that there were a dozen more emotions that almost got the cut into the film, for the filmmakers believe that the mind of a girl is much more sophisticated than just the colourful quintet.
What almost got in there, the co-director revealed, is Pride.
"He looked down at everybody, and he had nothing to do -- so we couldn't do much with him. Also there was a character Hope -- 'I hope this and that would happen', etc -- then we started having difficulty writing him because he kept saying 'I hope, I hope'. From our research, there are also a set of emotions that show up when we get older, and that will start to get things really complicated in terms of storytelling."
In the film, Joy is the dominant emotion that runs Riley's life. For Del Carmen, he said that his own principal trait is a combination of sadness and joy.
"I tend to have this melancholy disposition," said the Filipino, "but because of my job, I can't help laughing all the time."
That, he added, is one of the reasons that his main assignment in Inside Out is the emotional part of the film -- the part that made quite a number of adults cry at the film's premiere in Cannes.
"Doing comedy and doing the emotional part are equally difficult," he said. "Usually the melancholy part takes a longer time to set up -- the delivery [of the payoff] reaches farther back into the story, it's more accumulative before you can reach that statement. Comedy is more spontaneous. But altogether, we want to make a meaningful experience of it all. We want you to laugh at it, but also to have some gravity."
A fine art graduate, Del Carmen started his career in advertising in the Philippines -- "doing page ads of underarm rolls and stuff like that", he joked. At 30, he moved to the US knowing exactly what job he would find out there. His friend asked him to take up a job as an assistant to the art director at an animation company and Del Carmen told him that he didn't have any formal training and knew nothing about animation.
"I told him that in fact, I could be very bad at it! But they hired me and I learned on the job. Then I kept getting hired to do animation." At 40, he joined Pixar and over the past 15 years has worked with the studio's celebrated films such as Up, Ratatouille and Brave.
"I kind of fell into animation," he said, laughing. "There are other Southeast Asian and Asian staff at Pixar too. It's true that there are not many Asian stories [in Hollywood animation], and I'm interested in trying to see to that. But in our studio, we only tell stories the way that we know. Pete Docter cannot tell a different story from his own experience -- Inside Out is a story about a family from Minnesota, and that's specific to Pete. If you pick another storyteller then it'll be different. A lot of people want to make popular movies, and that may be a mistake. For me, I'd rather hear a story that's true to the storyteller. So let them show up in the world and be part of this campfire!"
Sadness, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Joy.
