Inside Out is kind of like a coming-of-age story, but told from a very different perspective. It starts by introducing us to the emotions inside the head of Riley, a little girl from Minnesota. Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and Fear (Bill Hader) run things in headquarters, taking turns at the controls of Riley. Joy mostly gets to run things, though, Riley amassing a huge collection of happy memories. But things are thrown into turmoil when Riley's family moves to San Francisco. Things go awry at headquarters, which results in Joy, Sadness and Riley's most important core memories being thrown out.
The film then cuts between Joy trying to make her way back to headquarters and the three remaining emotions trying to run things in her absence. This story takes some very abstract concepts and turns them into a grand adventure. It turns a little girl's psyche into a colorful landscape populated with figments of imagination and a working class devoted to keeping things together. The film is exactly what Pixar is all about, delivering a brightly-lit narrative that is unafraid to get melancholy. It is a story about embracing all our feelings, even the ones that don't feel too good.
The nuts and bolts of the plot take a very familiar form, with a pair of mismatched characters racing against time to get to somewhere important. This is basically the setup of eighty percent of all children’s films. But Inside Out takes this basic framework to stranger places. This is a story that mostly works within the realm of metaphor, the locations representative of the inner workings of the mind. The film creates landscapes that stand in for the complex mechanics of personality and memory, finding interesting ways to represent an emotional journey.
And so the characters are ride a train of thought and go to where dreams are produced. And the emotions assert themselves at different intervals, and we see the effect in Riley in the real world. It’s really clever stuff. The things happening outside drive the action inside, but the movie makes it appear that it’s the other way around. The journey within is purely representational, the anthropomorphized emotions a really ingenious means of showing the growth of this one person. All of it is done beautifully, with lively visuals and a willingness to explore tragedy within the context of a children’s cartoon.
There’s a wealth of imagination in these images. There would have to be, given the subject matter. But the world inside Riley’s head is a joy to behold. And when we get glimpses into the heads of other people, the differing design sensibilities do a lot to enrich the milieu of this particular world. The voice acting is top notch, with Amy Poehler and Phyllis Smith bringing a lot of personality into roles that are specifically written to be representative of a single emotion. Lewis Black, Bill Hader and Mindy Kaling are also delightful in much simpler, more outwardly comedic roles.
Inside Out is exactly what Pixar is all about. For years now, the company has been telling children’s stories that are much more willing to get emotionally complex. This film features the same kind of thinking that allowed for the depiction of tragedy in the first ten minutes of Up, and the quiet acceptance of fate in Toy Story 3. This is a film that is about that specifically, about the capacity of young people to take the bad with the good, the capacity to understand that there is more to sadness than just being sad. It’s a simple, yet beautiful truth that doesn’t get explored nearly enough.
My Rating:
