'Inside Out' Director on Finding Bing Bong’s Voice

Bing Bong in ‘Inside Out’ (Photo: Disney-Pixar)

Inside Out won Best Animated Film at this year’s Golden Globes, to no one’s surprise. (At least, no one who has ever had a childhood or a beating heart.) Even seven months after the film’s release, a speedy way to get someone to choke up is to mention Bing Bong, Riley’s imaginary friend who she stuffed deep inside her brain after outgrowing him. Selflessly dedicated to Riley like a bouncing pink Giving Tree, the pink, clownish elephant-like creature is perfectly voiced by character actor Richard Kind. His nasally, goofball voice is so spot on that when we bumped into the film’s director, Pete Docter, at the 2016 BAFTA Tea Party in L.A., we asked him when he realized that Kind was born to play a cat/elephant/dolphin hybrid mostly made of cotton candy?

“When we first started writing [Inside Out], we didn’t have anybody in mind, necessarily,” said Docter, who cowrote the screenplay with Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley, and developed the original story with Ronnie Del Carmen. “[Once we designed Bing Bong], we played a couple of actors. We don’t ever just go for first choice, done. It’s always, ‘Let’s dig.’” But after trying those others, they realized that Richard Kind was born to take Joy to the moon. “[Richard] didn’t even audition. He wanted to, but we said, 'No, no, you’re going to be great.’ We’d worked with him before; he was in Cars and A Bug’s Life. So we know that he’s a fantastic actor, he’s going to nail it.”

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What was it about Kind that made them think that he was the one? “His voice has a little bit of a plugged nasal sound that fits with the trunk somehow. And the big mouth, the way he talks. I don’t think of him as at all elephant-like, but this particular elephant, the pink cotton candy one, he just fit.”

“But I tell you,” continued Docter, “he came in the first recording session and he was really nervous because he had an approach and he’s not sure we’re going to like it. And from the first line, my producer, Jonas Rivera, and I were just looking at each other like we were going to ruin the take by laughing. He was just so perfect.”

Related: ‘Inside Out’ Minus Emotions Still Has All the Feels

Considering what a fan favorite Bing Bong turned out to be, it’s worth remembering that he was not revealed in any trailers, or mentioned at all in any of the film’s advance press. Docter says that Bing Bong was initially kept buried in the subconscious partly to keep some mystery, but also to simplify Inside Out’s high concept, which was far more complicated an idea to get across than “What if toys came alive when you left the room” or “a dad fish tries to find his son fish.” “[Inside Out] is a little bit of a head-scratcher to explain to people,” Docter told us. “Just the idea of emotions as characters…[we wanted to] keep that idea pure without adding this weird elephant made of pink cotton candy.”

Watch an ‘Inside Out’ featurette about Bing Bong: