Easter Eggs and other hidden tributes in Pixar’s “Inside Out”

Note, thanks to Leo Holzer for his help with this article. Light spoilers ahead.

Aside from their fantastic story telling and animation, the clever people at Pixar Studios are known for their Easter eggs. Those are the little secrets and references that are inserted into every film.

For example, one Easter egg in the film that was confirmed both with Ronnie del Carmen and Domee Shi is that Jangles the clown is a tribute to the late Joe Ranft and modeled after his Buttocks the clown costume.

If you don’t know who Joe Ranft was, Google his name. The impact he made as this Gentle Giant of storytelling and his legacy is amazing. Ranft taught so many others to believe that when hitting one dead end after another in crafting a film’s story to just keep working at it and “trust the process.”

There’s not one Pixar film that didn’t go through numerous retoolings throughout its production cycle.

Here are more Easter eggs and fun facts from the “Inside Out”

• Listen carefully for the “Haunted Mansion” soundtrack during Riley’s troubled night.
• The background memories on shelves inside or outside of Headquarters are shots from the “Married Life” scene in “Up.”
• As Riley and her parents trek to San Francisco, they come across birds on a telephone wire from production designer Ralph Eggleston’s 2000 short film “For the Birds.”
• When Riley and her family are eating Chinese food, they’re the same type of to-go box that you see in “A Bug’s Life”
• A few of the memory orbs contain images from the touching “Married Life” sequence from Pixar’s “Up.”
• The globe in the Riley’s classroom has been used in all the “Toy Story” films.
• One of Riley’s classmates is wearing a camo pattern made up of “Toy Story” characters. Another classmat is wearing a shirt with the same skull motif as Sid’s shirt from “Toy Story” films.
• Some of the background city cars of San Francisco have bumper stickers from “Cars.”
• In the Imagination Land of Riley’s head, look for Nemo the clownfish on the side of a boardgame box called “Find Me.”
• Dad’s company, Brang, is a nonsense word intended to sound like a startup that would fit in in the San Francisco tech scene.
• A sign on a parking meter in San Francisco reads, “Quarters and Dollar Coins or Barter During Burning Man.”
• Pixar’s good luck charm, actor John Ratzenberger, is in the film as Fritz
• As a tribute to the Walt Disney Family Museum, the filmmakers set Riley’s hockey rink in the exact spot the museum is located in San Francisco.

What I did not see were the Pixar ball, the Luxor lamp, or the Pizza Planet truck. If you see them let us know where they are!