“Movies keep getting bigger and bigger. As blockbuster season bursts beyond the borders of its usual summertime kingdom, we get the chance nearly every week to see the end of the world narrowly avoided by the heroic actions of a ragtag group of misfits, usually in spandex. If the stakes aren’t at their absolute highest (i.e., the end of humanity), people won’t care. Or so the thinking in Hollywood seems to go. Luckily, there are those studios and filmmakers who buck the trend, and no film in recent memory has done so in as beautiful, original fashion as Pixar’s Inside Out.
“Pixar has received some flack lately for turning so much of its attention to churning out sequels to some of its most successful movies, but Inside Out is proof positive that the studio is not even close to running out of innovation and creativity. Brought to the screen by Pete Docter – whose previous directorial effort, Up, left audiences sopping wet from crying – Inside Out is perhaps the most singular vision the studio has yet produced.
“Docter, along with co-director Ronnie Del Carmen and co-writers Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley, took on the herculean task of mapping out the human mind. That, in and of itself, is a more difficult mission than most filmmakers would dare to consider embarking on, but Inside Out is all the more impressive for honing in on the thoughts and emotions of Riley, a preteen girl whose life is uprooted when her family relocates from snowy Minnesota to the hip grunge of San Francisco. It’s hard to imagine a setting as emotionally rich, fraught with anxiety, fear, excitement, and sadness.
“Such emotions become the stars of the show, led by the boisterous Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler, ratcheting up Leslie Knope’s positivity to eleven) and the glum Sadness (a scene-stealing Phyllis Smith). Joy and Sadness battle in the high-tech Headquarters inside Riley’s mind. After a mishap involving Sadness accidentally infecting Riley’s happy core memories (which help define her personality), Joy and Sadness find themselves in the deep recesses of Riley’s labyrinthine long-term memory, tasked with returning said core memories to their place before Riley’s personality completely crumbles away.
“Inside Out has the action, humor, and pathos to match any action spectacle blasting away on your local IMAX screen, but its stakes resonate so much more. The film articulates emotional truths that I’ve never seen discussed in film: namely, the usefulness of sadness as an emotional compass, that blurry place where happiness becomes melancholy nostalgia, and the importance of honoring one’s current emotional state, however uncomfortable or confusing it might be. Kids love this movie, and as they grow, it will become more than colorful entertainment. It will help them investigate their place in the world, as well as the world within them. That’s a cause for Joy.” ~ Clayton Walter
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