INSIDE OUT Review
After six years, I’ve finally come around to watching INSIDE OUT. There’s no clear rhyme or reason as to why it took me so long to check this movie out — I consider myself a fan of Pixar and the film, as with any other Pixar release, opened to rave reviews — but after a nice stroll through five years of college, I’ve come into this movie as a young man having no idea where life is going to take me and with that, all the volatile emotions of fear, anxiety, and excitement (among others) that a change like that can bring. To say the least, there would probably be no better time to watch a movie like this.
Marking another knockout idea for the boundary-pushing animation studio, this bright animated film works around the idea of personifying everyone’s inner thoughts and emotions. These emotions: the bubbly Joy (Amy Poehler), the skittish Fear (Bill Hader), the ticked off Anger (Lewis Black), the judgmental Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and the Debbie-downer Sadness (Phyllis Smith) spend their days in a bureaucratic loft in our brain keeping our emotions and memories in check, each emotion taking turns at the wheel leading to the complicated and slapdash result that results in every man, woman, child, and even animal’s (showcased in one of the film’s funnier jokes) seemingly unknowable emotional behavior. Everyone in INSIDE OUT’s world has these little sprites running around in their head, dictating every feeling that comes to our minds which can seem like a pretty dark idea if one really thinks about it but Pixar and directors Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen bring that child-lensed magic to the proceedings by framing this idea through the eyes of 11-year-old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) as she goes through a momentous shift in her life: moving from Minnesota to California. Specifically, the brash and vivacious cultural hub that is San Francisco.
For Riley’s emotions, too, this move proves game-changing. As the usual head of the ship, Joy and her crew struggle to handle all the changes a move to a new city can have on a kid, leading to bouts of tears and joy at the drop of a hat. If that wasn’t stressful enough, Sadness’ increasing curiosity begins to worry Joy as she can’t think of a world where an emotion like Sadness feels needed (because after all, who wants to feel sad?) and it’s not long before a mishap on the control deck leads to Joy and Sadness being thrown out of the control center and lost amidst Riley’s subconscious leaving Fear, Disgust and Anger to hold things down as Joy and Sadness figure out a way to get back in time before Riley does anything regrettable while operating under the whims of an out-of-their-element Fear, Disgust and Anger. As Joy and Sadness explore the corridors of Riley’s mind, Docter and Del Carmen (along with writers Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley) cast a familiar story of young kids facing change in their life by adding a bit of that ol’ reliable Pixar patented creativity.
Going beyond just giving our intangible human emotions faces and voices, INSIDE OUT does the work and creates a genuinely intriguing world within our own heads where everything from our memories to our emotions to even our imaginary friends (displayed in Richard Kind’s sincerely zippy role as Riley’s old imaginary pal Bing-Bong) are brought to life thanks to an animated team that brings to life the weird yet beautiful creations that inhabit our heads. Contrasting between Riley’s view of a what appears to be a plain San Fran and that of the bubblegum colored world of the antics within her head, INSIDE OUT visually retains Pixar’s attention to detail that appears within both of these worlds. While the overall structure of Riley’s inner mind falls back on the tried and true bureaucratic themes that populate other imaginary worlds of Pixar, it’s never not funny to see what we consider to be complex emotions simply going through a 9-to-5 like us. While redundant, office humor will always bring a smile to my face.
Within this imaginative world Docter and Del Carmen assemble an impressive cast to imbue characters that are by design, one-note. As the sprites tasked with figuring out the mindset of an 11-year-old, each performer brings their own patented comedic quirks to fit perfectly into their roles. Even as Hader, Kaling, and the especially promising combo of the profane Black and Disney get a bit sidelined compared to Poehler and Smith’s more meaty journey, each actor makes an impression in their allotted time. It is Joy and Sadness’ journey where the dramatic shades impressively arrive, especially in regards to Poehler, who makes for the perfect match for Joy’s bubbly attitude which elevates to another notch when Joy begins to come to grips with her own emotions outside of her pre-determined one (bringing up the thought of “wait, so emotions have emotions too?”). As Joy realizes the importance of not just happiness, but every other emotion that supports or hinders it, a surprisingly emotionally mature story about a young girl coming to terms with her own changing life and emotions emerges in a way that respects the intellect of both of the film’s audiences.
What brings a sort of undeniable magic to this whole endeavor is in Docter and Del Carmen’s ingenious detailing of those tumultuous feelings that we all go through when life gets out of control. You don’t have to be an 11-year-old girl or her father (an underused Kyle MacLachlan) or her mother (an underused Diane Lane) to relate to those moments of when we just want to cry for no apparent reason, or for when we glide through our homes or the streets outside them on waves or joy when in the next moment we can slow down and ponder a memory that was once remembered as joyous now being tinged with a melancholy because almost every human experiences that at one point or another in their life. To put faces and operations behind those complex feelings and ebbs and flows of emotions and memory alike, INSIDE OUT reaches the thematic highs of Pixar’s best even if it the laughs can’t quite match it’s narrative depth.
Nevertheless, the studio has perfected the art of milking tears which afflicted this dear writer towards the film’s bittersweet (but mostly sweet) conclusion that taught a unique lesson for children and adults alike that all emotions are important in making us feel whole and human. For a film that documents a Cat-Bear-Elephant made of cotton candy that cries candy from his eyes, displaying the complex emotionality of humans is something that INSIDE OUT holds over most other films.
3.5/5
