A Guide To Inside Out’s Easter Eggs
As any fan of Pixar knows, they love hiding little allusions and references in their movies that only the sharpest-eyed viewers will sometimes catch. Inside Out is no exception; in fact, if the list in Yahoo Movies is accurate, there might be more easter eggs in this movie than any the studio has made recently.
A big factor in that figure involves the memory spheres. Sometimes references are deliberate, and sometimes it’s just more convenient to use a premade asset from another film that’s already there. When Hamm flipped through the channels in Toy Story 2, most of the TV clips he cycled through were from various commercials Pixar had animated in their past. Similarly, a lot of memory spheres may contain environments from other Pixar movies, though we’ll need the 4K version to see most of them. There is one sphere we can see up close and personal: one of Riley’s core memories is from preschool, and when Joy holds it up, it’s using the same set as the playground from Toy Story 3.
Pixar usually includes a reference to their next movie in their current one. The reference to The Good Dinosaur in Inside Out isn’t hard to find: during the car ride to San Francisco, Riley’s family stops at a roadside attraction filled with concrete dinosaur statues.
When you see the family’s living room in San Francisco, pay attention to the cooking magazine. You can make out Collette from Ratatouille on its cover.
When Riley is eating Chinese food, it’s from the same box that appeared in A Bug’s Life. This is likely one of those “assets we already had” types of things.
A poster in Riley’s classroom depicts the star-herding child from Pixar’s short La Luna, which played before Brave.
The prerequisite easter eggs are always the Pizza Planet truck, the numbers A113 and a speaking role for John Ratzenberger. According to Pete Docter, the Pizza Planet truck shows up an unprecented three times in Inside Out. We know of at least one thanks to the Pixar Wiki: it appears in a memory ball in the foreground when Joy and Sadness first meet Bing Bong. As for A113, it also appears thrice: as Riley’s classroom number, as some numbers on a train, and as graffiti on a street. Ratzenberger appears at the end as Fritz, the worker who….well, it’s a spoiler what his job involves.