Pixar Has Done It Again With Inside Out

Usually I leave the film reviews to Ken and stick to reviewing books, but I did want to post on Pixar's newest film, Inside Out. 

With my academic and personal interest in psychology (I double majored in it along with English in undergrad), I was really excited to see that Pixar would be making a film in which the main characters were personifications of the emotions inside a preteen girl's brain. Pixar has a reputation for making multilayer-ed films that appeal to adults as much as to children, but Inside Out took this beyond most of their previous films (beyond maybe Wall-E). Topics that I'm sure went beyond the heads of the many children in the audience included core memories, long-term memories, abstract reasoning, and dream production. Oh, and my favorite, a "train of thought" was portrayed as an actual train which the emotions Joy and Sadness hitch a ride on.

Joy and Sadness, along with Anger, Fear, and Disgust, live in the Headquarters of protagonist Riley's brain. With Joy in the lead, the team helps her make sense of the world, and things are going smoothly until Riley's parents uproot her happy home life in Minnesota with a move to San Francisco. From there, conflict ensues at Headquarters and Joy and Sadness find themselves lost.

It's all pretty existential stuff that only Pixar could pull off, making abstract emotions into believable characters. Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust look and sound the way we imagine the feelings they represent would. Anger is squat and red; Sadness is blue with a voice like Eeyore. The relentlessly optimistic Joy looks and acts like a fairy/pixie. And the green Disgust, voiced by Mindy Kaling, is all sarcasm and snark.

Yes, the kids in the audience, of which there were many, enjoyed Inside Out too. It's colorful and whimsical and funny, and not really scary (besides a couple scenes with a huge clown, which is terrifying at any age). But the content is way deeper than that of the average kids' movie.

I really appreciated the underlying message of the film, which was refreshing in a society that can take "positive thinking" overboard to the point of dismissing or suppressing all "negative" thoughts or emotions. Initially Joy tries to prevent Sadness from touching Riley's core memories and "tainting" them. Over the course of the film, however, she and the audience see that Sadness actually has an important place in Riley's life (and all our lives). It is Sadness that allows Riley to feel and receive empathy, and it is Sadness that finally urges her to open up to her parents about missing Minnesota.

I would enjoy seeing where Pixar would go with a sequel.  After all, our emotions only get more complex as we age. Would they add more characters to capture nuanced emotions like confusion or impatience? Or would the main team of emotions work together to create these degrees and blends of feeling? Maybe emotions are like colors, with primary colors mixing together to create blends or giving off more or less saturation for various shades/hues. But I digress...

After a few lackluster films, Pixar is definitely back to doing what they do best: multi-layered movies that are deeper than they appear. Inside Out has something for pretty much everyone - kids, adults, people with an interest in psychology, anyone trying to navigate their emotions in a healthy way. Yeah, really, everyone.