Joy plans (scene)

"Joy plans" is a scene used in Inside Out parodies. Its use usually involves Joy, Riley Andersen's lead emotion, planning about various subjects concerning both herself, her workplace and Riley.

In Inside Out
On the morning immediately following Riley's move to San Francisco, Joy wakes everyone up and tells to get ready for the day. Since she was on Dream Duty last night, she was awake and devising a plan for Riley to have a great first day at school (despite the actual planning not being seen on screen). She thus orders each emotion what to do.

At first, she orders Fear to make a possible list of negative outcomes. He has already been working on it, and is just wondering about the spelling of "meteor". Then, Joy orders Disgust to dress Riley up, instructing her to "make sure Riley stands out today... but also blends in". Disgust happily complies and believes she will outdo herself. Joy then orders herself, rapidly switching between two positions to indicate whether it's ordering Joy or ordered Joy who is talking. Joy tells herself to stay at the console at all times, which would keep Riley happy, before adding a compliment about her dress. She then rapidly spins, showing how the dress twirls, before stopping by the window of Headquarters. Through the window, the Train of Thought can be seen. Joy happily greets the Train of Thought, commenting that it's "right on schedule". As the train passes by and the camera turns to Headquarters, in the distance, a hatch can be seen opening and a package delivered through it. Joy then orders Anger to unload the daydreams (presumably from said package), anticipating the class to be boring, a sentiment Anger fully agrees with.

Lastly, Joy orders Sadness. At first, she tells her that Sadness has an important role, before leading her to the back of Headquarters. She then proceeds to draw a chalk circle on the floor around Sadness. Joy calls this "the circle of Sadness", and instructs Sadness to stay in the circle at all times. While Sadness weakly objects, Joy dismisses her complaint, before stepping to the console and proclaiming that Riley's first day at school and her life in San Francisco in general is going to be great.

As promotional material
Part of this scene, under the name "First Day Plan/Cannes Announce", was uploaded to Pixar's official YouTube channel on April 16, 2015. Per the name, the scene was part of the announcement of the premiere of Inside Out at Cannes on May 18 of the same year.

A roughly equivalent part of this scene is also featured in the website of the exhibit The Science Behind Pixar, in which it is shown in all steps of the process of creating an animated movie, from the storyboard to final rendering.

In parodies
This scene and "Anger plans" are in direct competition, as both are rough equivalents of the Hitler Planning Scene of Downfall parodies. The advantage of the "Joy plans" scene is that it features all the emotions and no other characters, and therefore can be used to characterize each emotion without thinking too much about outside world details other than the bare premise.

The outside world intro, featuring Riley eating breakfast as Joy plays her accordion, is usually cut out and replaced with the title card of the parody. Originally, the audio was kept, but later, it was replaced with a piano version. This is likely because the original audio also features Riley munching, which can be distracting from the parody's crux.

Joy is generally depicted as being brutally honest and not even trying to hide her bad intentions. In Joy plans to get rid of Sadness, she openly talks about the plan, even when Sadness is also featured in the same scene. The characterizations of other emotions were first established in Andersen's Mind - Trailer 2: Behind the Scenes, a BTS parody made shortly after the first parody using this scene. They are as follows:


 * Fear is Joy's chief plan organizer and is generally the least involved in the plan directly, only doing behind-the-scenes work for it (other than Joy herself on some parodies; see below), even if he wholly supports it. His best counterpart in Downfall parodies is thus Felix Steiner, who is mentioned in a vast majority of "Hitler plans" parodies and some Original Bunker Scene parodies without fail as the one supposed to carry out Hitler's plan, but who otherwise has no appearances in Downfall. In addition, as in the original scene, Fear might ask for clarification regarding the spelling of something.
 * Disgust is Joy's yes-man, similar to Joseph Goebbels, who not only agrees to Joy's plan, but plans to make it better. However, as she also plays this role in parodies using the "Anger plans" scene, it may be construed that she simply does not want to get on either lead emotion's and planner's bad side.
 * Joy, as the creator of the plan, puts herself on a pedestal. She might either be involved with the plan in the most direct manner possible, stay at Riley's console as she does in the original scene, or stay out of the plan entirely, merely commanding other emotions, as a way to reward herself for coming up with the plan.
 * Anger's stance differs between parodies, pertaining to him being the most complicated parody character other than Joy. He might support Joy while voicing his concerns, like Hans Krebs, or he might disagree with her, but comply to the plan, not wanting to disrespect her. He can even be depicted as two-faced; in "Joy plans to get rid of Sadness", he looks like he agrees with Joy's plan, but in actuality, he doesn't state anything that supports or opposes the plan, and in the immediate next video, Anger plans a counter to Joy's plan.
 * Sadness is not touched upon in "Behind the Scenes", due to her small number of lines in this scene, all very short. Therefore, she, like Anger, doesn't have one stance; she might comply with staying in the circle or object to Joy. However, her objections are weak, and therefore, she is not a good objector like Alfred Jodl is. In addition, the Circle of Sadness, as a joke punishment, has seen treatments of its own, such as in "Quarantined subreddits" by /u/preggit, posted to /r/funny.

Finally, after each emotion's character is established and their opinions are gauged by Joy, she finishes off the scene by concluding that the plan will be succeed with flying colors and that it will have whatever effect it is intended to have, and possibly, even more beneficial effects not originally in the plan, while completely disregarding its negative effects.

The line "Okay, first day of school! Very, very exciting!" is usually replaced with the introduction of the plan, similar to the use of a specific line to introduce Hitler's plan in "Hitler plans" parodies. However, as Joy proceeds to plan out Riley's first day of school in the actual scene, that means that the original dialogue of the "Joy plans" scene, were it not in Inside Out itself, would qualify as an Inside Out parody, unlike the original dialogue of "Hitler plans" videos.

Sometimes, Joy responds to herself in another language, such as English in Andersen's Mind - Trailer: Joy and the Memory Factory, or Lithuanian in Joy plans to code a language learning website.

The Train of Thought, in parodies using this scene, usually is directly related to the plan, such as being the substitute for the candy boat in "Joy and the Memory Factory" or carrying Minecraft crafting recipes in The Emotions play Minecraft: Java Edition.

Anger's newspaper, called "The Mind Reader" in the original movie, is once called an "iPaper" in "Joy and the Memory Factory", and seems to be a tablet-like device that Anger is told to pay all his attention to in order to accurately portray the media-obsessed Mike Teavee. Like the iBulb, the naming scheme is in line with CreativityTheEmotion's general style.

Stage directions
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20151207171801/http://waltdisneystudiosawards.com/downloads/inside-out-screenplay.pdf (official release by Disney, but now removed from the original website)

Capitalization and punctuation is preserved from the original source.

Trivia

 * According to The Science Behind Pixar, each frame of this scene took ca. 33 hours to render. At 1 minute 34 seconds and 24 frames per second, the total CPU time of this scene's rendering is ca. 74,448 hours or 8.5 years; however, the wall clock time is significantly shorter, as rendering is parallelized in a rendering farm consisting of 2000 computers.

Goofs

 * As Joy is running past the emotion "apartment", in the background, Sadness and Fear memories can be seen in shelves, despite Joy being the only person at the console since the last time the shelves were emptied and their memories sent to Long-Term Memory.

Downloads

 * Joy plans (Russian, mp4)