It was in 2015 when the first installment of Inside Out finally hit theaters, becoming one of Pixar’s greatest proposals that we all still love today and with which we can feel very identified.
Well, now that the second part of the story has finally arrived in theaters, many theories, rumors, and curious facts have begun to come out that you could not imagine, and here we present a very strange one: Riley is inspired by a real person and here we will tell you everything you need to know about this little girl.
Riley from Inside Out 2 exists in real life. Who is she?
It was 9 years ago when Pete Docter, the director of the first installment of Inside Out, revealed that the story of the film came from someone very special to him: his little daughter, Elie Docter, who at the time was only 11 years old.
“The whole story came about when I saw my daughter grow up. My daughter voiced young Ellie in ‘Up,’ that energetic, brave girl with her hair all the way there, and she looked a lot like the character of that moment.”
As the filmmaker mentions, his daughter voiced little Elie in ‘Up’, at the moment when she meets Carl Fredricksen and shows him his adventure book. At the time, Elie Docter was around 10 years old, however, his personality was already beginning to transform, so the director wondered what was happening in her head and how he could transfer that to the emotional story we all know now.
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“The innocent bubble of childhood bursts and you feel thrust into an adult world where you are judged and expected to behave in a certain way. You want to be great, but you’re not really sure what that means.”
Meanwhile, in Inside Out 2, we see Riley entering the adolescent phase, so the team had to get down to work in order to make her on-screen development much more real. Kelsey Mann, director of the sequel, and the producer, Mark Nielsen, had to resort to a completely different strategy for this installment.
On the one hand, the team turned into a group of nine girls between the ages of 13 and 19, who adopted the name “Riley’s Crew”. According to the director, this small team was in charge of giving them notes about the film, offering their opinion on Riley’s development as a person, with her family, and with her friends.
However, Kelsey Mann also found inspiration in his children. The film began production in 2020, when the director’s children were 13 and 14 years old, respectively, so the decision to position the second installment of Inside Out at this time in life was more than obvious.
