Riley’s hot dad was the hardest character for the animators to get right on Inside Out 2

polygon.com:

Pixar’s Inside Out left a twofold legacy in the animation world. Some people think of it as a poignant movie about the necessity of sadness that turned abstract psychological theories into whimsical set-pieces and a resonant storyline. But a certain subsection of the internet decided that Riley’s dad (voiced by Kyle MacLachlan) is actually a hot daddy.

The 2017 Buzzfeed piece “It’s Finally Time We Talked About The Hot Dad From ‘Inside Out’” (subtitled “A Pixar DILF”) ignited this conversation, which has… never really stopped since. There are tweets, fan edits, and thirst trap posts galore. (Warning: That last one’s as NSFW as you can get with a fully clothed person.) Every so often, people rediscover how much they lust after the dad from Inside Out. (Sidebar: His first name is Bill, in case you were wondering.)

With a newInside Out movie on the way, now is the perfect time to remember this particular internet crush, and ponder whether he’ll sway some new hearts in Inside Out 2. On a recent press trip to Pixar, I had the chance to tell production designer Jason Deamer about the internet’s fervor for Riley’s hot dad.

“Well, we cannot let them down,” he laughed.

As it happens, Riley’s dad gave the team the most trouble among the human characters when they were translating assets from the original 2015 movie into the newest version of Pixar’s animation system. It’s been almost 10 years since the first movie, which means nearly a decade of software updates, so reusing the same assets wasn’t an option, and the filmmakers had to start from scratch. The character designers were able to recreate Riley and her mom with no problem, but the 2024 version of Bill Andersen was missing a certainje ne sais quoi.

“He was weirdly hard to do,” Deamer says. “We have his actual face geometry… and it didn’t look like him! All we ended up doing was taking his eyes and doing that [makes a gesture indicating furrowing the character’s brows and pushing them forward a little more]. I