FADE IN:

INT. KAITLYN DIAS’S BRAIN

We are inside the MIND of eleven-year-old KAITLYN DIAS. We are introduced to her EMOTIONS, which apparently look like RADIOACTIVE MUPPETS.

CGI AMY POEHLER

Hear that, people? EMOTIONS. Not aspects of her personality. So shut the fuck up about us ripping off Herman’s Head. That show was a piece of crap anyway.

(smiles)

Not that I’d actually say anything like that, cause I’m JOY! I’m a HAP-HAP-HAPPY fount of sunshine-and-puppies-and-rainbows-and-flowers positive energy! I run this place with a breezy efficiency, although I can be a bit of a manic control freak, and can’t stand things to not be PERFECT.

CGI PHYLLIS SMITH

Say, does this character seem just a tad familiar to you?

CGI AMY POEHLER

Knope! Now, here with me are Phyllis “Sadness” Smith, Bill “Fear” Hader, Lewis “Anger” Black - which I believe is Lewis Black’s actual nickname - Mindy “Disgust” Kaling, and, uh...

(looks around)

Wait, where’s everybody else? No way is that an entire person’s worth of emotions. Where’s Guilt? Where’s Jealousy? Embarrassment? Shock? Are we really saying that this little girl has reached the age of eleven without once feeling shocked?

CGI LEWIS BLACK

Look, if we included an entire suite of emotions we’d have like fifty characters with a single character trait each, and suddenly we’re The Smurfs.

CGI AMY POEHLER

I guess, but - Disgust? Really? Does that one make anybody’s top five?

CGI MINDY KALING

UGH, if you’d just pay attention to my snarky condescension and constant eye-rolling, you’ll see that I’m here to play out a stereotypical attitude towards prepubescent girls. GOD.

CGI AMY POEHLER

So anyway, we all work in this sort of command center where we control Kaitlyn’s feelings and actions, and where her short-term memories are created in the form of translucent bowling balls which are color-coded happy gold, angry red, sad blue, disgusted green or fearful - uh - what the fuck color is fear?

CGI BILL HADER

I dunno. Light purple?

CGI AMY POEHLER

That’s... sure, whatever. This is also where we store Kaitlyn’s core memories, each of which powers an island based on some aspect of her personality. There’s an island for her goofball nature, one for family, one for friendship, honesty, and hockey.

CGI LEWIS BLACK

A whole fifth of her personality is just hockey? I feel like there’s an opportunity for a lazy Minnesota joke in there.

CGI MINDY KALING

Don’t bother, I’m pretty sure it already is a lazy Minnesota joke.

CGI AMY POEHLER

Now, Kaitlyn’s emotional life was stable and me-filled until one day

(reaches into hat full of cliché childhood crises and pulls out:)

her family moved to another state DUN DUN DUNNNN!

EXT. SAN FRANCISCO

KAITLYN and her parents KYLE MacLACHLAN and DIANE LANE move to their new, approximately two-foot-wide “house”.

CGI KYLE MACLACHLAN

Welcome to your new home, kiddo! I’m so glad we didn’t show you any photos of the place before now, or seemingly give you any details about it at all, otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten to see the hope die in your eyes like that. It was HILARIOUS!

CGI KAITLYN DIAS

Maaan, this makes me feel so - hang on, I won’t actually know that until the staff of my brain get their shit together in real time.

CGI LEWIS BLACK

This place is a DUMP! SCREW THIS! I’m gonna randomly mash all these unlabeled buttons and make Kaitlyn do ANGRY STUFF RAAAHHH!!

CGI MINDY KALING

Well I’m more concerned with how filthy and gross it is, so move aside while I mash basically the same random buttons, but when I do it it makes disgusted stuff happen, blegh.

CGI AMY POEHLER

NOPE NOPE NOPE. Executive override, I’m boss so I declare we’re happy.

CGI PHYLLIS SMITH

But it’s kind of a downer that-

CGI AMY POEHLER

HAPPY! Seriously guys, if we can just keep pressing buttons that make Kaitlyn happy all the time regardless of context, why not just do that?

CGI MINDY KALING

You mean like one of those electrode rats?

CGI AMY POEHLER

Hey, those guys are SO HAPPY up until they starve to death. I know, let’s plug in a happy gold memory ball to cheer Kaitlyn up! Remember that roadside attraction on the trip here? That was fun.

KAITLYN’S mood improves with the happy memory, but then PHYLLIS compulsively GRABS THE MEMORY BALL and turns it PERMANENTLY SAD.

CGI AMY POEHLER

Phyllis! What the hell, man?

CGI PHYLLIS SMITH

I’m sorry, but this is like in real life, where happy memories can turn melancholy after you lose something.

CGI AMY POEHLER

Well sure, happy memories about THE THINGS YOU LOST. What messed-up kind of logic is it that Kaitlyn would get depressed about some hokey dinosaur sculpture she saw for five minutes? Seriously, stop touching random stuff.

CGI PHYLLIS SMITH

Okay OH MAN I GOTTA GRAB ALL THE CORE MEMORIES AND TURN EVERYTHING SAD FOREVER

CGI AMY POEHLER

CUT IT OUT! Goddamn, I can't believe the movie is actually going to wind up siding with you and your need to slobber over everything.

CGI PHYLLIS SMITH

Hey, there's no harm in getting good and miserable every now and then. For instance, now Kaitlyn's at her first day of school. If I give her another case of blue balls now, and she breaks down crying in front of her whole class, I don't see how that could lead to any problems.

CGI AMY POEHLER

Okay, at this point are you just deliberately securing future work for yourself?

KAITLYN has a NERVOUS BREAKDOWN in CLASS. This causes a new CORE MEMORY to be created, but as it's all SAD, AMY tries to stop it being INSTALLED, and in the ensuing kerfuffle AMY and PHYLLIS and ALL THE CORE MEMORIES wind up stumbling into a PIPE and get SUCKED AWAY to LONG-TERM MEMORY STORAGE!

CGI LEWIS BLACK

OH CRAP! With Amy and Phyllis gone, Kaitlyn won't be able to feel anything other than anger, disgust and fear! We gotta fix this before she starts calling in to political talk-radio programs!

CGI MINDY KALING

It's even worse than that! Don't you see? Amy and Phyllis are now a mismatched pair trying to make their way home. They just turned this into a buddy movie, and in the process turned the three of us into the other toys from Toy Story!

CGI BILL HADER

You're right! They'll get colorful adventures where they experience character growth and reveal hidden depths, while we get the occasional token scene and fail to develop beyond a single character trait each! AAAAGH!

CGI LEWIS BLACK

RRAAAGH!

CGI MINDY KALING

Ugh.

INT. KITCHEN

KAITLYN sits moodily at the DINNER TABLE with her PARENTS.

CGI KYLE MACLACHLAN

And hey, in this scene we get to see what OUR emotions are up to! This is so entertaining I'm nearly not distracted by the incredibly lazy "oblivious dad, long-suffering mom" dynamic we've dredged out of the sitcom playbook.

CGI DIANE LANE

Yes, this is a really fun scene. Shame that half the audience just took a bathroom break because they already saw the entire thing several times when it was used as a trailer.

CGI KYLE MACLACHLAN

Well while we wait for them to get back, here's something to mull over: your emotion guys are all women and mine are all men. Is that just a coincidence? Or is Kaitlyn going to have to deal with a serious gender identity issue somewhere down the line, what with her brain being forty percent dude?

CGI DIANE LANE

I think that's one of the many things we're not supposed to be giving too much thought.

CGI KYLE MACLACHLAN

You mean like the fact that my brain is apparently ruled over by anger and yours by sadness?

CGI DIANE LANE

Yeah let's definitely not follow THAT line of thinking to any conclusions. Yikes.

EXT. (STILL INT. FROM A CERTAIN PERSPECTIVE, BUT LET'S SAY EXT.) LONG-TERM MEMORY

AMY and PHYLLIS are stuck amongst the shelves containing KAITLYN'S MEMORIES, which are naturally situated at THE VERY EDGE OF A GIGANTIC PIT OF OBLIVION.

CGI PHYLLIS SMITH

This girl needs to start thinking real hard about guard rails.

CGI AMY POEHLER

Crap, we need to get home! Okay, this place is pretty damn big, but surely we know our way around well enough to find the entrance to the control room.

CGI PHYLLIS SMITH

Actually, we've never been out here before. Because the control room has no entrances or exits. If everything had gone smoothly we would have never gotten out of that thirty-square-foot room. Ever ever ever.

CGI AMY POEHLER

Jesus. Our lives are horrifying.

CGI PHYLLIS SMITH

Keep in mind you're talking to the person whose job is to constantly obsess about being miserable.

CGI AMY POEHLER

Oh well, never mind that, if there's no official way back we'll just have to figure something out! Ooh, we could carefully walk across this foot-wide pipe suspended over the oblivion pit. I'll carry the core memories.

CGI PHYLLIS SMITH

So your plan is to tightrope walk for half a mile on a slippery curved surface whilst carrying five bowling balls?

CGI AMY POEHLER

Not likely to work, I'll admit, but the attempt ought to at least provide a hair-raising action-

GOOFBALL ISLAND DISINTEGRATES and SMASHES THE PIPE before this scene can start to GO SOMEWHERE.

CGI AMY POEHLER

AAGH! What just happened?

CGI PHYLLIS SMITH

I guess Kaitlyn’s dad tried to cheer her up with goofball antics, but trying to access Kaitlyn’s personality islands without the core memories plugged in makes them completely break apart and collapse into the pit.

CGI AMY POEHLER

Holy hell, Kaitlyn’s psyche is fragile as fuck! Seriously, she moves house, has a bit of internal emotional conflict, and next thing you know her whole mind starts coming apart? I’d hate to see her if her dog died, she’d probably throw herself under a bus.

CGI PHYLLIS SMITH

Well let’s start looking for another way to get home. Hopefully at some point we’ll stumble across a guide by sheer accident.

AMY and PHYLLIS wander around until they meet SOMETHING called RICHARD KIND.

CGI AMY POEHLER

The hell are you supposed to be? You look like somebody made Snuffleupagus into a float at the Gay Pride Parade.

CGI RICHARD KIND

I'm Kaitlyn's childhood imaginary friend. While all the other products of her imagination are concentrated in a specific area, I happen to just be out wandering randomly around so I can conveniently assist you. Here, put those bowling balls in my magical bag of holding.

CGI AMY POEHLER

Yay arbitrary contrivances!

CGI RICHARD KIND

So I'm presuming you're trying to find Kaitlyn's train of thought so you can ride it to headquarters? It is after all seemingly the one regular form of contact headquarters has with the outside world, so surely you thought of that straight away.

CGI AMY POEHLER

Uh, of course we immediately thought of that thing that we've seen every single day of our lives! We're not morons after all, ha ha, ha.

RICHARD leads AMY and PHYLLIS to the TRAIN STATION. They go through the ABSTRACT THOUGHT level and the IMAGINATION LAND level but they skip the MEAT CIRCUS because that place is gross.

CGI AMY POEHLER

All right, we’ve made the train, but it’s not moving because Kaitlyn’s asleep! We’ll have to give her a nightmare to wake her up. Let’s just hope Bill is the one monitoring her dreams, otherwise she’ll be incapable of feeling fear and this will be a huge waste of time!

They go and CRASH KAITLYN’S DREAMS.

CGI AMY POEHLER

My name is Mr. Charles! You want to break up your father’s business!

CGI RICHARD KIND

Don’t think about elephants!

CGI AMY POEHLER

Damn, it’s not working. Let’s switch Nolan references.

They bring in a PSYCHOTIC CLOWN. KAITLYN wakes up in terror and the TRAIN gets back into motion!

INT. HEADQUARTERS

By now LEWIS, MINDY AND BILL’S INEPTITUDE have led to the destruction of HOCKEY ISLAND and FRIENDSHIP ISLAND.

CGI LEWIS BLACK

NUTS TO THIS! I say if we need core memories we just go back to Minnesota and make new ones.

CGI MINDY KALING

The idea being that if you lose some stuff, the location where you got it is bound to spontaneously generate replacements? Like if your kid dies you just go back to the hospital and they’ll hand you a new kid, is that your reasoning? It would appear brain disintegration is contagious.

CGI LEWIS BLACK

SHUT UP. IT’S A GOOD PLAN. We just get Kaitlyn to swipe her mom’s credit card and run away! You couldn’t think of a plan more efficiently calculated to destroy Honesty and Family Islands and thus complete the annihilation of Kaitlyn’s entire personality!

CGI BILL HADER

And what does Kaitlyn expect she’s going to do when she gets there? Where’s she going to stay? How long until her parents follow the credit card trail and drag her home? For real, what does Kaitlyn actually think is going to happen here?

CGI LEWIS BLACK

I think your mistake is in thinking there is such a person as “Kaitlyn”. Really, if our little committee here controls her thoughts and feelings and actions, then she’s basically an empty construct whose debatable consciousness is at best a patchwork delusion on her part.

CGI BILL HADER

Huh, I suppose so. But let’s not let the audience think too hard about that, or they might start to apply that same reasoning to a consciousness built from an endless succession of momentary electro-chemical states, and suddenly we’ve bred an entire generation of existential nihilists.

KAITLYN swipes her MOM’S CREDIT CARD. Inside her BRAIN, HONESTY ISLAND collapses and takes out the TRAIN. AMY, PHYLLIS and RICHARD barely escape while the TRAIN plummets into the ABYSS.

CGI AMY POEHLER

Well Kaitlyn just lost her train of thought. Like, permanently, it was just obliterated. Between that and the fact that four-fifths of her entire personality has crumbled to dust, how is she even functioning right now? Shouldn’t she be lying limply on the floor, drooling into the carpet?

FAMILY ISLAND starts to disintegrate also! Thousands of MEMORIES are knocked into the ABYSS, pushing KAITLYN’S PREDICAMENT well into the realm of PERMANENT BRAIN DAMAGE! In the chaos a PNEUMATIC TUBE becomes EXPOSED.

CGI PHYLLIS SMITH

Oh hey, it's one of those delivery tubes we use to send memories up to headquarters. Say, why the hell didn't we shove the core memories into one of those things right away? They could have been reinstalled ages ago and Kaitlyn's mind wouldn't have dissolved into mush.

CGI AMY POEHLER

Who cares, now that it's cracked wide open I can ride it back to headquarters! I see no problem in being in a glass tube suspended over a deadly void right when half the world is in the middle of shattering to pieces.

She gets in, but wouldn’t you know it, the tube BREAKS, and she falls into the PIT, as does RICHARD when he tries to save her.

CGI AMY POEHLER

Oh GODDAMN THIS MOVIE and its simplistic habit of just making the ground collapse under the protagonist’s feet every time they look like they’ve made a fucking inch of progress! Now we’re gonna die here and everything is utterly and completely ruined!

(sobs uncontrollably)

CGI RICHARD KIND

Okay, how the hell is it even possible for you to be sad? You’re literally an anthropomorphic personification of the very concept of joy!

CGI AMY POEHLER

I don’t know. Maybe there are five guys in MY head controlling MY emotions. Maybe it’s brain muppets all the way down, who knows? Doesn’t matter either way, this was just that family movie thing where the main character loses hope for four seconds and then regains it.

(regains hope)

Ha HAAA! Now we need a way out of here.

CGI RICHARD KIND

Ooh, what about the rocket sled Kaitlyn imagined for me back when she was a kid? It was dumped down here hours ago, and even though I started disappearing Marty McFly-style the second I landed, it’s still conveniently fine!

They jump in the IMAGINARY ROCKET SLED, but it’s not POWERFUL ENOUGH to get all the way out of the PIT, because KAITLYN has a SUCKY IMAGINATION. So on the next try RICHARD bails out, allowing AMY to make it to the top by herself.

CGI RICHARD KIND

Good job! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to dissipate into nothingness and be dead.

CGI AMY POEHLER

Uh huh, sure. See you when you come back into existence with little to no explanation after the climax.

CGI RICHARD KIND

Nope. No family movie copout, I’m afraid. I, an entity of pure innocence and friendliness who has had a great deal of screen time, am going to permanently and unambiguously die.

CGI AMY POEHLER

What? But - there’s gonna be some kind of vague hint of hope or a silver lining, right? Like that stupid thing in The Princess and the Frog where Ray got to be a star in the end?

CGI RICHARD KIND

Sorry. I’m going to just vanish into complete non-existence, and the girl who dreamed me up, once my closest companion, will simply forget about me forever.

CGI AMY POEHLER

Holy FUCK that’s dark.

CGI RICHARD KIND

Of course, if we’re suggesting that the figments of Kaitlyn’s imagination have meaningful existences in the first place, that means that earlier I outright murdered a sentient cloud, so maybe I’m not such a great guy after

(evaporates)

AMY hurriedly grabs her BALL SACK and improvises a wild plan to get back to HEADQUARTERS. She uses a BALLOON to redirect PHYLLIS’S CLOUD OF TEARS, then constructs a LADDER made of CANADIAN BOYFRIEND CLONES, because seriously, we haven’t even mentioned like half the WEIRD-ASS PSYCHEDELIC SHIT in this movie.

INT. HEADQUARTERS

AMY and PHYLLIS arrive back at HEADQUARTERS.

CGI LEWIS BLACK

You gotta help us! All the controls have frozen up! Kaitlyn is no longer capable of feeling emotions!

PHYLLIS takes the controls and they instantly WORK.

CGI MINDY KALING

Oh, so apparently sadness is the one emotion she can feel? Ew, that sounds like a lyric from a terrible emo ballad, just saying it made me throw up in my mouth a little.

CGI AMY POEHLER

No, guys, I get it finally. You can’t just keep looking on the bright side and staying chipper through thick and thin; sooner or later you actually have to experience pain or it’ll never go away. You wind up a more well-rounded person, and creates a richer and more rewarding bond between you and your loved ones. Sadness is actually pretty useful!

CGI PHYLLIS SMITH

Hey, that’s a very mature and thoughtful message!

CGI AMY POEHLER

Exactly! So come on Phyllis, rub yourself all over Kaitlyn’s core memories, rendering them indelibly sad and rooting her entire personality in misery and despair forever.

CGI PHYLLIS SMITH

Okay wow, even I think that’s way too fucking far in the other direction.

But NOT SO! KAITLYN’S MIND is RECONSTRUCTED and EXPANDED and she makes NEW FRIENDS and gets CLOSER TO HER PARENTS and she winds up HAPPY and HEALTHY and STABLE, all thanks to the power of SADNESS!

CGI AMY POEHLER

Wow, who would have thought they’d ever come out with a mainstream family movie all about the joys of deep-seated unhappiness?

CGI PHYLLIS SMITH

Are you kidding? Pixar LOVES me. Have you ever seen the Toy Story movies? Or Up? Sadness paid for John Lasseter’s yacht.

END.