Brazilian who worked on “Inside Out 2” reveals behind the scenes of the film

“Inside Out 2” premiered in Brazilian cinemas on June 20 and is causing quite a stir. In addition to the film becoming the biggest box office hit of 2024 in Brazil alone, the production had the biggest opening for an animated film in the country, attracting more than 4.5 million people to theaters.

The plot has a time jump compared to the first feature, from 2015, and the protagonist Riley is now a teenager. Along with maturing, the young girl’s mind control room is also undergoing demolition to make way for new emotions: Anxiety, Envy, Shame and Boredom.

During the production process of the film, about 100 people from the animation team were involved. One of these people was Bruna Berford who is Brazilian and has worked at Pixar since 2020.

In an interview with CNN , Bruna explained what her role was, which went far beyond creating the characters’ movements. “I take care of all the acting of the characters, the things that are on the scene. I bring the characters to life and make them seem alive on stage,” she said.

“There’s a whole process of why I’m moving this character this way, what he must be feeling when he does this action, all to be able to convey the correct message to whoever is watching”, he adds.

The Brazilian remembers that she joined Pixar during the Covid-19 pandemic and, since then, has been in the animation of titles such as “Luca” (2021), “Red: Crescer é uma Fera” (2022), the TV series “Cars on the Road” (2022) and another series should be released later this year.

How does Pixar animation work?

During the interview, Bruna highlighted that the animation of a film is very detailed and that, in “Inside Out 2”, it was no different. “We even joke here that sometimes you can’t blink. It’s a lot of work and especially with a level of animation that we try to maintain at Pixar, which is very high.”

The Brazilian gives some examples and highlights the importance of not watching a film on a small screen, such as a cell phone: “In every detail, you have to animate even the characters’ eyelashes, the pupil, the iris, you have to animate everything you see on the scene. So, it really takes a long time to do 15 seconds, sometimes it takes a month and a half, almost two months to do 15 seconds in the scene.”

Bruna says that almost the entire animation department at Pixar participated in the film and adds that, in the studio, the team tried to keep an animator doing a sequence, which is several scenes together, to facilitate the reasoning process for those who will animate the characters.

She highlights the importance of animation directors throughout the work process. “We always have to show them. Their job is exactly to make us animate, for example, Anxiety the same, at the same pace, throughout the film. So that’s what we have directors and animation supervisors constantly looking at, to see if there’s anything that’s standing out in the wrong way.”

Striking scene in “Inside Out 2”

Among the scenes animated by Bruna in the film, one in particular stood out.

“There’s a sequence I did, where they’re walking through the halls of memories, and it’s a scene that has Joy, Fear, Disgust and Anger. It’s the first scene where they start walking and it was technically very difficult to do, because there were four characters walking and acting on top of the walk. So, for those who do animation, this part is very complicated, because you have the mechanical part of walking and the acting part, one layer above”, he describes.

The Brazilian actress also says that she was in the final stretch of her pregnancy when she animated the film and, therefore, she was also exhausted, but the work paid off in the result. “It was a fun scene to do, but also very difficult technically. It was a huge challenge and it was the scene that took me the longest to do, but it was also one of the last”, she adds.

“Inside Out 2” grosses $155 million, has best US debut of the year