The team behind Disney’s hit sequel to Inside Out has revealed that new addition Anxiety went through a lot of physical transformations before they settled on the character design that made it into the final film.
IGN recently shared a behind-the-scenes tour of Pixar’s animation studios to promote Inside Out 2, where director Kelsey Mann unveiled some previous character art that was considered for the character.
“I love this design [but] it took a long time to get here,” he said of Anxiety. “There are lots of iterations that led up to this design.”
During the video interview, he showed an early design he drew himself, which depicted Anxiety as a reptilian character, who grows over time to become more Godzilla-esque as teenager Riley becomes more anxious.
“She shows up small, but the more you fight it, the worse it gets,” he recalled. “I was like, ‘what if she actually grows?’.
“And then [in] my epilogue version, where when [Riley] realises how to manage it, it actually shrinks down to the proper size, and is super cute.”
Kelsey also spoke about another version of Anxiety, which would have seen the character “pretending to be someone else”.
“She showed up as this character named ‘Tia’, and her business card said ‘transitional integration advisor’,” he recalled. “That was her name, and she was hiding who she really was, which was Anxiety. So she was kind of like this con artist.
“It was fun but it was kind of confusing. We were like, ‘why doesn’t she just show up as Anxiety’, we didn’t need that twist.”
Elaborating more on the design process, Kelsey also said: “Of the five main characters in the first film, three of them were women and two of them were men. And the men had this really pushed design look.
“And I remember Jason Deamer, our production designer, saying, ‘let’s push the female characters of the new emotions in the same way’. So you can kind of see elements of Fear within Anxiety – the big eyes, the floating eyebrows – they have the same kind of thing within Fear.”
But Anxiety’s design isn’t the only behind-the-scenes change that went on while making Inside Out.
Writer Meg LeFauve revealed last week that two more emotions were originally considered for the story, while Kelsey previously admitted that a post-credits scene at the end of the movie was only added at the eleventh hour.
