It’s fair to say Inside Out 2 has been a hit with audiences, recently becoming the highest-grossing animated film in American box office history.
The movie, which follows on from the original story featuring the anthropomorphised emotions of a child called Riley, added some new characters as the main character got older.
Those included Envy (voiced by Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser).
However, when speaking to IMdB, the film’s director Kelsey Mann said that he’d left a very, very fun-to-watch feeling on the cutting room floor.
Which was?
“Schadenfreude,” the director revealed, adding “I wish we could get it into the movie.”
After sharing “we tried it” in another version, he explained, “It’s a German expression ― it’s the feeling you get when you take pleasure in someone else’s pain.”
He continued, “So we had him show up, he was like this German character and like, Fear hit his head on something and he was like, ‘Ah hah, your pain amuse [sic] me!’ in a German accent.”
And that’s not the only emotion we missed out on, either ― in the same interview, producer Mark Nielsen said, “Jealousy was in the movie too as a twin of Envy.”
Apparently, “They were identical twins that no one could tell apart.”
However, the character got cut because “we did the research and they really are different emotions, so it didn’t make much sense.”
Shame and Guilt were also removed from the film.
Huh! Anything else?
Yep! The movie-makers considered including Procrastination Land as an Island of Personality (the parts of Riley’s character and life visually depicted as floating rocks in the film).
But they cut it as “it didn’t add to the story,” screenwriter Meg LeFauve told IndieWire.
“It didn’t add to Joy’s journey or Riley’s or Anxiety’s. You start to understand: we want to be with these emotions. And we care more deeply for Anger and Fear and Disgust. It’s about Riley. What do we need to tell their story?” she asked.
Well, whatever they chose certainly worked from a box-office point of view (still, I would have loved to have seen Schadenfreude hanging out with his pals in Procrastination Land).