Pixar feature ‘Inside Out’ explores emotional tumult of 11-year-old girl

TORONTO – “Inside Out” star Phyllis Smith can’t help but get emotional.

She is, after all, one of the stars of Pixar’s new emotion-laden romp, a brainy animated feature centred on the volatile emotions of an 11-year-old girl.

The affable Smith plays Sadness, a blue-tinged sour puss who helps guide the prepubescent Riley through life along with her other dominant emotions: joy, fear, anger and disgust.

It’s a role Smith practically fell into, much like her acting career, she admits.

“One of the lucky things about working for a Pixar movie is the fact that they know what they want,” Smith says during a round of interviews in Toronto.

“They heard my voice in another movie and Jonas Rivera, the executive producer … calls (director) Pete Docter and said, ‘I think I’ve found our Sadness.'”

That film was “Bad Teacher” with Cameron Diaz. Before that, Smith made her name as the soft-spoken but occasionally snarky Phyllis Vance on “The Office,” another role that was offered to her out of the blue.

That Smith would have a long-running TV career — and now a film career — is astounding to the 63-year-old, who spent nearly 20 years working in casting before finding herself in front of the camera.

“I really feel that God or the universe —however you want to label it — knew the inner desires of my heart better than I did and was kind enough to give me good things,” says Smith, choking up as she traces her unconventional route to stardom.

Ostensibly, “Inside Out” is about Riley, a happy-go-lucky kid usually driven by Joy, an effervescent yellow sprite voiced by Amy Poehler. But it’s the emotions themselves that land in the eye of a brewing storm, struggling to navigate uncharted territory.

When the 11-year-old learns suddenly that her family is moving to San Francisco, Sadness starts taking over as Riley loses her friends, school and beloved hockey team in Minnesota.

And Riley’s other more reactionary whims also emerge: Lewis Black’s stocky red Anger, Bill Hader’s wiry purple Fear, and Mindy Kaling’s sneering green Disgust find more and more reasons to lash out.

The shift starts to affect core memories deep in Riley’s mind — glowing orbs that roll through her noggin like a pinball machine and help define her “islands of personality.”

The crisis sends Joy and Sadness on a frantic mission to stop the tumult, winding through deep recesses that include Imagination Land, Abstract Thought, Long Term Memory and Dream Productions.

Rivera calls it “the biggest set we’ve ever built at Pixar.”

“We’ve done outer space for ‘WALL-E’ and the ocean for ‘(Finding) Nemo’,” Rivera says in a separate interview earlier this year alongside Docter.

“But there’re endless cities and regions and things in the mind.”

And not all of them are candy-coloured dreamworlds. Docter says he’s proud to helm an animated tale that acknowledges darker impulses and explores their impact.

“You have to, otherwise I think you don’t get something deeper,” says Docter, who also co-wrote and directed the Oscar-winning tear-jerker “Up.”

“I think most of the films that stuck with me both as a kid and as an adult deal with difficult things, just like life.”

As a result, the sweet-but-sullen Sadness gets a meaty story arc, which Smith says mirrored her own evolution as a first-time voiceover artist.

“I was very nervous and shy about it,” she says of her initial recording sessions.

“By the end I could tell a little more if I was hitting the mark that they were wanting or not wanting, so I had a little more confidence by the end. I wonder if in the beginning I were as confident, if the character would have had … maybe not as interesting a journey as she took with her insecurities.”

Smith says her acting career began when she was a casting associate for “The Office,” a job that included making sure the actors were on time and getting producers their coffee.

The director asked her to read with the character of Pam, and she obliged. It turned out later that he was actually testing Smith for a role.

“It was not a conscious thing at all,” she says of her accidental career, which follows earlier stints as a dancer and cheerleader.

“I can honestly say in all my years of casting — which were 19 — I never once said, ‘Oh, is there a role for me?’ Because I really thought that that part of my life was gone. And I was happy in casting. But now I am exuberant in this new life.”

“Inside Out” opens Friday.