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      What Does Anxiety Look Like? How Pixar Created the ‘Inside Out 2’ Villain

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      The breakout character was initially envisioned as a monster. But when the filmmakers saw it wasn’t working, they found their way to a softer antagonist.“Inside Out 2” delivers a fresh crop of emotions for Riley, the film’s 13-year-old protagonist, who begins the story at the cusp of puberty. Anxiety, Embarrassment, Envy and Ennui join the core emotions from the original film: Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness.The most consequential of the new arrivals is Anxiety, whose well-meaning but chaotic influence pushes Riley and the other emotions to the edge of mental and social catastrophe. Voiced by Maya Hawke and bursting with discomfiting character details — unruly hair, bulging eyes, a grand-piano grin — Anxiety emerges as the hit sequel’s breakout star and unstable center of gravity.In a series of interviews, the team at Pixar that brought the character to life — the director Kelsey Mann, character designer Deanna Marsigliese and animation supervisors Evan Bonifacio and Dovi Anderson — broke down Anxiety’s anatomy and discussed taking inspiration from psychology research, the bird kingdom and the produce aisle. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.What was the initial idea for the character? Who was Anxiety?KELSEY MANN, director Initially, she was a shape-shifter. She was going to be this person who was lying about who she was. I wanted somebody that was almost made of clay. Kind of a monster character, almost like a lizard. But we eventually got rid of that twist because it made the movie really complicated.In early concept art, Anxiety, here opposite Joy, looked like a monster and had a claylike feel.Disney/PixarThe character was imagined as a shape-shifter and a liar.Disney/PixarWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Interview’: Eddie Murphy Is Ready to Look Back

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      Eddie Murphy has been so famous for so long, occupying such a lofty place in the cultural landscape, that it can be easy to overlook just how game-changing a figure he actually is.Let’s start, as Murphy’s career did, with standup. There had been star comics before — Steve Martin, Richard Pryor — but none exploded with anything like Murphy’s speed or intensity. Swaggering, magnetic and able to bounce between sweet personal storytelling and controversial, defiantly un-P.C. material, he was, and forgive me for mixing disciplines, a rock star. “Eddie Murphy: Raw,” released in 1987 when he was only 26, is the highest-grossing standup-comedy film ever — still. The scale of his success, and the fact he achieved it without dulling his edge, redefined what a comedian could do, paving the way for the likes of Kevin Hart and Chris Rock.Listen to the Conversation With Eddie MurphyDavid Marchese talks to the comedy legend about navigating the minefield of fame, “Family Feud” and changing Hollywood forever.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon Music | NYT Audio AppHe also, of course, cast his spell on TV. When Murphy arrived at “Saturday Night Live” in 1980, the show was thought to be on the verge of cancellation. Through sheer force of charisma as well as instantly iconic, hilariously unpredictable recurring characters like his crotchety Gumby and the Mr. Rogers parody Mr. Robinson, Murphy brought the show back to life. A highly plausible argument can be made that without him, television’s most reliable comedy-star-making machine might not have made it to a 10th anniversary, let alone be nearing its 50th.But Murphy made his greatest mark in movies, where he reached new heights, for comedians and Black performers, of popularity and bankability. He helped pioneer the action-comedy genre with his quippy, improvisational-feeling performances in movies like “Beverly Hills Cop” and “48 Hrs.” And then in the mid-1990s, after a bit of a career dip, he transitioned to family-friendly films like “Shrek” and “The Nutty Professor” (one of multiple comedies in which Murphy virtuosically played wildly different characters), and continued to score giant hits.All of which is to say that American pop culture looked different after Eddie Murphy came along. Now he’s returning to the character that sent his career into the stratosphere with “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” which comes to Netflix on July 3. It arrives 40 years after the first film in the series, in which Murphy stars as the wisecracking detective Axel Foley. He is clearly comfortable with the role — and with himself. In recent years, Murphy has been a somewhat enigmatic offscreen presence, but as I found out over the course of our two long conversations in the spring, he can be open and relaxed. He was eager to reflect on what he has achieved, share some Hollywood stories, explain why doing standup doesn’t appeal to him anymore and reveal the dream project he has never gotten off the ground. More

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      The Broad Appeal of the Elsa Dress from “Frozen”

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      Wearing a costume from “Frozen” in daily life has become a pastime for many children who identify with the character, regardless of gender.Dressing up as Elsa, the blond queen with magical powers from Disney’s animated film “Frozen,” wasn’t necessarily Jeff Hemmig’s idea of a good time.​​“It was well outside of my comfort zone,” Mr. Hemmig, 43, said.But he knew it would make his son, Jace, happy. So Mr. Hemmig, who lives in Killingly, Conn., squeezed his shoulders into a dress his mom made for him, which matched an Elsa costume she had made for her grandson. Mr. Hemmig then performed a rendition of “Let It Go,” choreography and all, as Jace watched.“He loved it,” Mr. Hemmig said. “He was filled with joy.”Mr. Hemmig wasn’t thrilled about wearing the dress: He said it was tight in the armpits and it made him feel vulnerable. But he loved how it delighted his son, then 3. “Seeing Dad do it, too, felt like a big moment,” Mr. Hemmig said.Like the Hemmigs, countless parents have gone to great lengths to satisfy their Elsa-obsessed children since “Frozen” was released in 2013 and became the cornerstone for one of Disney’s most successful franchises. And Mr. Hemmig is far from the only father to dress as Elsa with his son.Such instances have happened enough that the actor Jonathan Groff, the voice of the character Kristoff in “Frozen” and “Frozen 2,” thanked the films’ directors at a 2022 event for “creating space for young boys to dress up as Anna and Elsa,” the franchise’s sister protagonists.Jacqueline Ayala had been a preschool teacher for five years when “Frozen” came out, and it quickly infiltrated her classroom. For a time, Ms. Ayala recalled, there was only one Elsa dress in its dress-up chest. “That’s why the kids started wearing their own costumes to school,” she said. “So they wouldn’t have to share it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Taylour Paige Is Ready to Read More Jung

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      The actress stars in the new “Beverly Hills Cop” movie, but off-camera, she’s reading several books at once and streaming both YouTube and the Criterion Collection.In the new movie “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” Taylour Paige plays Jane Foley, Eddie Murphy’s daughter. But the 33-year-old actress grew up idolizing a different Murphy-helmed film franchise.“‘The Nutty Professor’ — I probably watched that movie like 200 times on VHS as a kid,” she said.“I recited every line to him almost every day I shot with him,” added Paige, who previously starred in the 2021 movie “Zola” as the title character. “I had a lot of questions, like, ‘How do you play six to eight people believably?’”Paige, who lives in Miami, was calling from Toronto, where she was filming the “It” prequel series “Welcome to Derry.” It’s another franchise to which she wasn’t previously attuned — she hadn’t seen any Pennywise films, nor had she read Stephen King’s 1986 novel that started it all. “I’m a scaredy cat,” she said.While she might not be up on clown-based horror, she lives for soaking up knowledge of vintage cinema, Gnosticism and Jungian psychology. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Magnesium TabletsI find magnesium really helpful when I have to travel, or I’m jet lagged, or I have to be on set early and need to go to bed and I’m in a completely different time zone. It also helps dial up my digestion, and it regulates the nervous system.2WalksI’m very grateful to have legs and to be able to walk, and I don’t say this lightly. I walk everyday, three to five miles. I find it inspiring. You can observe and take in and exist. I’ll listen to music or, right now, I’m listening to the Gnostic scriptures. I have dogs (Aretha, a pit bull, Baba Joo, a Chiweenie and Juice, a pit bull-bulldog) which compel me to walk, but I also love taking a simple hand-in-hand stroll with my husband.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Dr. Alex Arroyo Spends His Sundays (in Costume)

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      Dr. Alex Arroyo, a director of pediatric medicine in Brooklyn, gets to live out his “Star Wars” dreams, practice jujitsu and make a big mess while cooking for his family.“Hey, buddy, how are you doing?” a man wearing a Boba Fett costume said as he leaned over the bed of a young boy in a hospital gown.It was a Sunday afternoon in the emergency room at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, where Dr. Alex Arroyo, the hospital’s director of pediatric emergency medicine, often dons one of more than 20 costumes when he visits patients. His favorite is Boba Fett, the famed bounty hunter from the “Star Wars” films.“I love what I do, but it’s sure hot in there!” said Dr. Arroyo, 48, who has worked at the hospital since 2006. He started wearing costumes in 2021.A die-hard “Star Wars” fan who grew up watching the original trilogy with his parents, Dr. Arroyo has passed that love on to his two youngest children, Grayson, 8, and Karra, 6. For New York Comic Con each year, the whole family dresses up, including his wife, Dr. Sharon Yellin, 44, a fellow pediatric emergency medicine physician who works at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. One year they went as the family from “Encanto.”“I was the big, strong sister with the donkey,” Dr. Arroyo said, referring to the character Luisa.Dr. Arroyo, who also has a 21-year-old son, Colin, from a previous marriage, was born in the Borough Park neighborhood of South Brooklyn — at Maimonides, in fact. Now he lives less than a mile from the house where he grew up, in a four-bedroom, three-story 1920s brownstone. He uses one of the spare bedrooms as his office and rents out the third floor.“It’s a frightening place to be inside of because I’m also an active-duty comic collector,” he said of his office. “It’s filled wall to wall with toys. It’s my sanctuary away from the world.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Woman Sleeping With Her Stepson? This Director Knows It May Shock.

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      The French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has been exploring relationships between girls and older men since the 1970s. Her latest, “Last Summer,” flips the script.When the French director Catherine Breillat was 40, her then-husband and the father of her first child ended their relationship to be with a much younger woman. Soon after, Breillat started dating a man 12 years her junior.“Men want to repudiate their wives of a certain age by saying they couldn’t be loved by anyone anymore,” Breillat said in a recent video interview via an interpreter. “But for me that’s not true. I want to tell other women there’s no cause for despair.” In “Last Summer,” which comes to theaters Friday, she probes at this realization through an incendiary premise.Since the 1970s, the lauded director, now 75, has repeatedly focused her unflinching gaze on the troubled sexual awakenings of girls, often in the uncaring hands of older men, but in “Last Summer,” that dynamic is inverted: A middled-aged lawyer, Anne (Léa Drucker), risks her career and marriage by having a clandestine affair with her 17-year-old stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher).In “Last Summer,” Anne, played by Léa Drucker, risks her career, and her marriage to Pierre, played by Olivier Rabourdin, by having an affair with her stepson Théo.via Sideshow and Janus FilmsThe film, Breillat’s first in a decade, joins several recent movies concerned with the power dynamics of heterosexual couples in which the woman is older, including the lighter Anne Hathaway-vehicle “The Idea of You” and Todd Haynes’s divisive “May December.” (Haynes’s movie was inspired by the true story of a teacher who started a relationship with one of her students.)According to Breillat, this wave of films reflects a simple reality. “It’s the truth,” she said: “Young people are attracted to older women.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stream These 9 Movies Before They Leave Netflix in July

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      A bunch of major titles are leaving for U.S. subscribers this month, including films by George Lucas and Ang Lee. See them while you can.Two of the biggest movies of the 1970s and one of the biggest of the ’80s are among the movies leaving Netflix in the United States in July; other highlights include a family favorite, a comic book oddity and an unconventional biopic. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Abducted in Plain Sight’ (July 14)Stream it here.This true-crime documentary became such a must-watch (and must-discuss) sensation on Netflix, it ended up spawning a limited series dramatization on Peacock. It’s not hard to see why: This is truly stranger-than-fiction stuff, detailing how the 12-year-old Jan Broberg was abducted by a neighbor and family friend, Robert Berchtold — and then, somehow, abducted again by the same man several years later. The internet outrage surrounding the film (and blaming Broberg’s parents) missed the point; the director Skye Borgman sensitively and intelligently explores how Berchtold used brainwashing and grooming to commit his shocking crimes.‘Big Eyes’ (July 23)Stream it here.In an era of increasingly dreary, paint-by-numbers biopics, the works of the screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski seem like oases in the desert — witty, insightful, poignant and frequently cockeyed portraits of unconventional subjects like Larry Flynt, Andy Kaufman and Rudy Ray Moore. This 2014 effort reunited the writers with their “Ed Wood” director, Tim Burton, telling the story of the artist Margaret Keane, whose wildly popular and undeniably distinctive paintings were originally believed to be the work of her monstrous husband, Walter. Amy Adams plays Margaret with sympathy and grace, while Christoph Waltz’s turn as the egomaniacal Walter is the best work he has done outside of the Tarantino-verse.‘American Graffiti’ (July 31)Stream it here.This 1973 coming-of-age comedy-drama was a mind-boggling launchpad. First and foremost, it started a movement of ’50s nostalgia (even though it is set in 1962, it still feels like the ’50s) that continued through the decade with the likes of “Grease” and the film’s unofficial TV spinoff, “Happy Days.” It was also a big break for several members of its then-unknown cast, including Candy Clark, Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Mackenzie Phillips, Charles Martin Smith and Cindy Williams. And perhaps most important, it was the first big hit for its co-writer and director, a quiet young California filmmaker named George Lucas, who based the picture on his own youth as a Modesto hot-rodder. Its critical and commercial success allowed him to take on his dream project, a sci-fi epic called “Star Wars,” and well, you know the rest.‘Fatal Attraction’ (July 31)Stream it here.This erotic thriller from Adrian Lyne was one of the most successful pictures of 1987 — and one of the most controversial, prompting heating conversations about its depictions of adultery and mental illness that moved from movie listings to opinion pages and magazine covers. The story is simple: Michael Douglas stars as a family man whose seemingly offhand weekend extramarital affair with Glenn Close turns into a matter of literal life and death. It is a deeply flawed picture — Close’s nuanced characterization outclasses the paper-thin caricature she’s given, and critics of the era were right to call out the cheap-thrills ending as a cop-out — but a nevertheless fascinating snapshot of the era’s sexual mores and moral paranoia.‘The Great Wall’ (July 31)Stream it here.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Balmain’s New ‘Lion King’ Collection Marks 30th Anniversary of Disney Movie

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      A new Balmain collection pays homage to the Disney film on a milestone anniversary. Plus, a preppy designer makes a comeback.For Olivier Rousteing, the creative director of Balmain, the Parisian luxury house, South Africa is a long way from home. But the country is close to his heart.“My passport is French,” said Mr. Rousteing, 38, on a phone call from Paris. “But my blood is African,” added the designer, who learned relatively late in life that he is of Somalian and Ethiopian descent.The coastal Western Cape region of South Africa provided inspiration for Mr. Rousteing’s latest style collaboration: a Balmain collection developed in partnership with Disney to promote the 30th anniversary of the “The Lion King,” which was released in June 1994.The project was a kind of spiritual homecoming for the designer, as well as the realization of a childhood fantasy. Mr. Rousteing was 9 when he first saw the film. It taught him some valuable lessons. “Take nothing for granted,” he said. “Through your journey there will be obstacles and challenges, but trust in yourself, never give up.”His limited-edition collection, influenced by artisanal African textiles, patterns and silhouettes, was conceived to reflect the movie’s characters and pervading themes. Its ready-to-wear and couture pieces — which include zebra-stripe coats and jackets, a densely fringed raffia dress and a bustier gown patterned with familiar “Lion King” characters — are showcased in a short film shot near Cape Town and featuring models from across Africa.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More