How Disney came up with its bubble shooter for Pixar’s ‘Inside Out’

When Pixar’s newest film, Inside Out, came to fruition, the teams at Disney knew they wanted to create a mobile game, among other ancillary content, to go with it. But it wasn’t obvious how to take a cerebral and emotional film like Inside Out, which is about the emotions that go on inside a young girl’s head as her family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco, into a game.

The movie takes abstract concepts like emotions and turns them into characters like Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear. They each have a different color, and when something happens to the main character, Riley Anderson, she forms a permanent memory. Inside her head, that memory takes the shape of a big glass marble with a color, associated with the emotion that dominates it, such as gold for Joy or blue for Sadness. The idea of taking that little ball and turning it into an orb in a bubble shooter game became the basis of the mobile game.