‘Inside Out 2’, The Year’s Highest-Grossing Film, Is A Sequel That Takes The Original Concept To New Heights – Contenders Film: The Nominees

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Kelsey Mann is the director behind the year’s top-grossing movie, Inside Out 2. At $1.7 billion worldwide, his sequel to the Oscar-winning 2015 Pixar toon not only outgrossed that one to become the biggest Pixar hit of all time but won wide critical acclaim for taking to new heights of imagination and invention the concept of all these various emotions operating inside a young girl’s head, anxiety being chief among them.

Mann took the reins of this one from the original’s director and now-Pixar chief Pete Docter and made the most successful feature directorial debut of all time.

During our interview, I asked what the Animated Feature nomination meant to him. “I was the guy [at Pixar] that was once printing out the Oscar ballots, you know, for everybody to kind of do their whole thing.

And the fact that I’ve got a film on that ballot that I directed is incredible,” he said at Deadline’s virtual event Contenders Film: The Nominees. RELATED: Contenders Film: The Nominees — Deadline’s Complete Coverage For Mann it was key to take this all to the next level in order to make it a success that isn’t just riding the coattails of what came before. “It was really important to me that we do something that was a worthy follow-up to the first film,” he told me. “And I did try to literally go in deeper with what Riley’s going to experience, because those are my favorite sequels — the ones that kind of enhance and grow and kind of explore things or a little more complicated.