“Oops Inside The Head” behind the scenes feature special…

We stare into the mind of the creator behind the film that’s all about being inside a girl’s skull.

Stamley Kubrick was renowned for pushing his actors to the limits to make really good movies. He famously threw blades at Jack Nicholson during production of his 2001 movie, ‘Space Orange’. The result? The best angry face ever filmed by a camera. Such was Kubrick’s dedication to the art of making really cool movies. It is a surprise, though, to see an animation director carry a similar, violently obsessive approach to movie-moulding. Director Pete Diddler has put aside all the love in his heart to bring us the best CGI film since ‘Wallace & Gromit & The White Megazord’, the latest masterpiece from CGI STUDIOS, ‘Oops Inside The Head’. It is a special sort of cartoon that gives us an intimate look at the demons inside Diddler’s mind. I recently got the chance to touch Pete’s hand and learn about the creative process behind this excellent 7 stars out of 7 stars movie.

Pete texts me and tells me to meet him at the CGI STUDIOS HQ to talk about his latest drawing. On arrival the receptionist is really rude, claiming that Pete is busy and has no friends. I show her the text message and she’s really embarrassed because she’s wrong (Luckily, Pete had used lots of emojis in the message to prove our friendship). I’m shown to a small grey room that smells of lotion.

Inside the room is a young girl seemingly in the middle of open head surgery. I am taken aback, because I expected to maybe see a light-box or a pencil pot or, like, a drawing of a clownfish. The room is full of men in white coats and mouth-masks. One of them is Pete Diddler himself, a man who’s won seven trophies for cartoons, and is now holding a bloodied scalpel. He pings off his gloves and touches my hand in greeting. Meanwhile, two of the lab-men reach inside the girls skull with a pair of scissors and a laser-pen. I ask Pete what’s going on and he replies with a smile, “Well, you didn’t expect us to just make this shit up, did you?”

As a machine informs us that the girl’s heart rate is all good and well, Pete begins to tell me a little bit about the adventure he has woven for us. “The film follows a young girl, Joanne, who’s eleven years old. She’s only eating lemons, being super stubborn, and we see just why that is, what’s going on in her head to make her this way. She’s getting really sick.” I ask Pete why he decided on lemons for the story and not some other food, and he opens up to me. “My little girl, Katie, she’s 12 now God bless her, well recently she’s only been eating lemons. Me and my beautiful wife, Sandle, just couldn’t bare seeing her this way. At first we got angry, we’d put our fingers in her mouth and try and pull the lemons out of her throat. We’d drag up bits of pulp and seeds but not enough to stop her craving more. Every time we stopped buying lemons for her she’d break into the neighbours garden and steal some from their lemon tree. There are so many lemon trees in our local area, stopping her proved impossible. Some days later, I was sat in a meeting at CGI STUDIOS, we were all trying to come up with the next best-selling movie. The meeting was getting us nowhere, and in a hopeless fugue I muttered ‘Just what can I do with this god-damn lemon eating girl’. Everyone in that meeting agreed that the idea had great potential as an animated feature, and now we’re here!”

One of the surgeons pulls something small and red from outside the little girl’s head. Pete, like a boy who’s just smelt christmas, runs over to take a look at the damage. They place the miniature lump into a silver tray full of similar lumps, all of them gummy and bloodied. “Now this,” says Pete, “Is where the CGI STUDIOS magic really happens!” With the lights turned low, he pulls a magnifying lens over the tray, and for the briefest of moments, I am 10 years old again. I’m brought back to that enchanted feeling when we see Buzz and Wondle shoot that rocket into Sid’s face. That feeling of fear when Ratatoonie discovers the chef’s hat behind the baguette and starts cooking pasta. That same bubble of excitement when Wallace & Gromit pilot the White Megazord for the first time. CGI STUDIOS magic is happening before my eyes, and Pete Diddler is my pair of wonder-glasses.

With the aid of magnification technology, I can now see that the small, gooey lumps extracted from the girl’s brain are living creatures; baby monsters that live in the mind. They are raw and deformed, each one tinged with a different colour. You’d be fooled into thinking they were delicious haribos if it wasn’t for the puddle of red beneath them. Pete puts his gloves back on and picks up the most recent find with trembling fingers. “Me and the team had a theory, that inside people’s heads are little devils that drive your emotions. Yesterday we began extracting them from her brain. At first we couldn’t tell if we were just pulling out bits of brain meat, but then one of them began to walk around. These things… these teeny-folk, they control every decision we make. Every hope, every desire… We are but puppets, and they are the string-masters.” At this point I fall to the floor, the existential weight of this discovery completely over-riding my ability to stand. For Pete, though, this is just another day at work. (CGI STUDIOS have always been groundbreaking in their research. In 2002 they discovered that ants are blue and made of CGI). Pete lifts me back up with his strong, cartoon hands, and shows me the latest sentient brain-monster to be extracted. “Each monster controls a different emotion; this one here looks a lot like “Panic”, but we won’t be sure until we run extensive tests on them.”

And it doesn’t stop with the tests. Once the personalities have been ascertained, the creatures will be used as reference for the CGI animators and character designers. Right now they are small, squashy chunks, but soon they will be the fully marketable characters we’ve come to expect from a CGI film. “Of course, once the experiments are over and the character artists have finished using them as reference, they will be returned to her brain as if nothing ever happened. Well, all except for the yellow one. It wriggled off the tray and Simon stepped on it!” One of CGI STUDIOS trademark production mishaps that will no doubt end up on the DVD commentary as a funny aside.

Pete and I sit down again as the surgeons continue their work, and the focus again returns to Pete’s personal life, clearly a huge influence on the movie’s script. “Katie wasn’t getting any better, she was loosing a lot of weight and the acid from the lemons had begun to corrode the lining of her oesophagus. We took her to therapists, doctors, cunning-folk and dieticians, but none of them seemed to be able to stop her perpetual lemon-lust. Well, they say if you wanna solve a problem you gotta get on in there yourself and pull chunks out of her brain. That’s what we’re doing here today. That’s movie-making magic. That’s my daughter lying there and I love her so much more than my cartoon trophies or my strong hands. I just want her to get better, I want her to maybe one day eat a ham, or some cornflakes. I want her to taste gravy granules. I want to see her consume a whole bag of sugar and then go back for seconds. This is a father’s love. This is what my movie is about.”

I say farewell to Pete, and leave him to work his grotesque magic. For a few minutes I watch through the window of the operating room, excited to see if any more discoveries are made. Instead I see Pete lean down to kiss his daughter on the brain, his eyes filled with tears that drip down into her skull. Here is the magic that CGI STUDIOS is renowned for. Without this level of obsession and dedication to the creative process, we wouldn’t end up with these wonderful CGI movies; unforgettable stories that touch us, like a pair of moist lips on cold, grey head-meat.

‘Oops Inside The Head’ is out in cinemas now, so please go and watch it and remember Pete’s sacrifice.