A wellness institute at a Colorado university partnered with Pixar Animation Studios to launch a social-emotional learning tool for children.
Inspired by the Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar movie “Inside Out,” the tool — called InsideU — was created by the Renée Crown Wellness Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder in partnership with Pixar, Liquid Interactive and the Boys & Girls Club of Metro Denver.
InsideU features four short films with characters from “Inside Out,” a 2015 film that follows a big life change for a young girl and personifies her emotions as characters living in her head.
InsideU uses characters and clips from the movie to teach children about emotions and how to act on them. The free platform currently features four episodes, each of which takes about 10 minutes to complete and includes interactive learning opportunities. Each lesson applies to real-world problems elementary school-aged children face, the institute said in a statement.
“By combining science, health education and brilliant animation, we have a golden opportunity to engage millions of young people to learn about their emotions and foster better relationships with others during childhood and throughout their lives,” Sam Hubley, a psychologist and assistant research professor at the Crown Institute, said in a statement.
The Crown Institute studies social and emotional learning to improve people’s self-awareness, responsible decision-making and social skills.
Hubley and the Crown Institute were inspired by “Inside Out” to create an emotional education tool for children. Its goal with InsideU is to improve children’s mental and emotional wellness, according to the institute.
“When ‘Inside Out’ came out in 2015, I was brimming with excitement, because I’d had a couple of these failed attempts at doing health education that was more public-facing and community-based,” Hubley said. “And I loved the movie so much and thought it did have really strong potential to be an educational tool and also a platform or a springboard to having deeper conversations about emotions and mental health.”
Hubley, who at the time had a faculty job at the CU Anschutz campus, paid Pixar a “few hundred bucks” to screen the movie at Alamo Drafthouse in south Denver. After the screening, children would participate in art projects. Adults gravitated toward Hubley, psychologies, psychiatrists and other colleagues in attendance to ask questions about mental health and treatment. For two days, Hubley nearly sold out the theater.
Based on that event’s success, Hubley wrote a letter to the film’s director Pete Docter thanking him for creating the movie and telling him about the successful events he hosted thanks to “Inside Out.” Hubley said he didn’t ask for anything in the note but did mention that his grandparents would be proud of the work Docter did on this film.
Hubley is the grandson of John Hubley, an Academy Award-winning animator who worked on Disney films like “Pinocchio,” “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Bambi” and “Fantasia.”
Two weeks later, Sam Hubley received a letter back from Docter.
“One of my colleagues describes it as me writing a letter to [the] North Pole,” Sam Hubley said. “Santa wrote me back because Pete sent me a hand-type letter with his signature at the bottom.”
A couple of years later, after back-and-forth visits and emails between Sam Hubley and Docter, Hubley and the Crown Institute were given a “grant of rights” to use intellectual property from “Inside Out” for free.
Sam Hubley said this is a unique partnership with Pixar, one that doesn’t happen often. He said the only other similar partnership between the animation studio and a company is with Khan Academy, which uses some of Pixar’s intellectual property in a free module about computer-generated animation.
The Crown Institute worked with Liquid Interactive to build the web-based app, gathering feedback from kids at the Boys & Girls Club of Metro Denver throughout the process. Hubley and team also ran the platform by the legal team and creative franchise at Disney, which owns Pixar.
A pilot version of InsideU took place in the summer and fall of 2022 with students ages 6 to 13. InsideU launched to the public on Feb. 13.
“InsideU has been a huge hit for the Club members I work with,” Julie Arbuckle, a mental health team member from Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro Denver, said in a statement. “They are beyond excited for the next emotion lessons to come out.”
For now, the InsideU team is focused on conducting pilot evaluations with the Denver metro Boys & Girls Club before expanding to other clubs in Colorado and across the U.S., Sam Hubley told Colorado Inno via email.
He said the InsideU team is also exploring options to raise funding that would support the creation of new episodes focused on emotion regulation.
“In future releases of InsideU, the team hopes to coordinate with Pixar Animation Studios on incorporating new characters and storylines from ‘Inside Out 2,’” Sam Hubley told Colorado Inno.
