10 out of 10 stars
Over the last few years, Pixar’s output had been slowly declining in quality. Known as some of the best storytellers in modern cinema today, they had unfortunately set up a standard for themselves that audiences have come to expect. Therefore, when Pixar suffers a misstep, it’s glaring. However, despite popular opinion, I still remained loyal to the Pixar brand and enjoyed most of their recent productions (with the exception of Cars 2). It was obvious that their movies were not up to the Pixar standard, but they were still better than most movies being released nowadays.
Upon peeping the first marketing material for Inside Out, I wasn’t expecting much, figuring it’d be more on par with Pixar’s recent outings. Positive word of mouth caught my ear. Weeks after its release, I knew that I needed to see it. As someone who has studied psychology as an undergrad and someone who’s a little too close to their own feelings (I shed tears for practically every animated movie), this was right up my alley.
And I was completely right. Even now, 16 hours after having viewed it, I’m still having a lot of trouble finding the words to express how much I love this movie. I can throw out as many adjectives as I can possibly come up with to describe this movie - breathtaking, beautiful, poignant, heartbreaking, funny, clever, and imaginative – though they help to describe the movie, all of them fail to really convey how this movie made me feel. That is, after all, what this movie was all about.
As someone who was fascinated by psychology in my formative years, seeing them attempt to create a world around all the processes that govern our mind was an absolute delight. Not only was it beautifully rendered, but it was done with a decent amount of accuracy and a large amount of cleverness. There was a lot of careful attention to detail to properly explain every little function so that not only was it entertaining to watch and breathtaking to behold, but it made sense in their world and our brains. For the most part, that is.
The movie begins just as our protagonist, Riley, opens her eyes for the first time and sees her parents. As she opens her eyes, her mind begins to form, providing exposition for the 5 personified Emotions who drive and protect her – Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Fear (Bill Hader). Every emotion has its purpose, but they can’t seem to figure out why the gloomy Sadness is there. Every day, Riley creates new memories characterized by balls of shimmering light and categorized by the prominent emotion (most are happy memories), but the most important are her core memories, which help to make up the core aspects of her personality, portrayed as the “islands of personality.” Riley grows up to the ripe age of 11. She is a normal girl. Active, playful, and very loving. Everything seems perfect; that is until her father gets involved in an upstart company that requires relocation clear across the country.
Riley is uprooted from her hometown in Minnesota to San Francisco. She is generally a happy child, who has the ability to remain optimistic in the face of disappointment, but having found a dead rat in her new home, the moving truck being incredibly late, unintentionally sobbing in front of her new class, and her best friend in Minnesota finding a new friend, Riley begins to lose herself. Suddenly, things aren’t looking so bright and she’s having a hard time maintaining that optimism. The Emotions are scrabbling inside, attempting to find ways to keep her spirits up. While they continue to protect her from any negative emotions, Sadness becomes overwhelming for the others when they discover that she can somehow modify once happy memories and make them sad. In the attempt to help with Riley’s core memories, Sadness nearly tainted them with Joy jumping in to protect them. Their scuffle causes them to be jettisoned out of their cushy headquarters and thrown into the deeper recesses of Riley’s mind, where long-term memory is stored. Without her core memories, Riley loses the link to her islands of personality, thereby losing herself. Sadness and Joy must find their way back to headquarters and re-establish the link to her personality, as she begins to deteriorate. On the inside, her personality begins to crumble quite literally. On the outside, we see a girl slowly descending into a deep depression.
And I suppose it’s that descent that really got me. Having studied depression and suffered from it, I was nearly overwhelmed to see how accurately it was played out on screen. Everybody deals with depression differently, but there are a core set of symptoms as with any disease. It’s the way in which those symptoms were portrayed and how they came about that really resonated with me. Losing the link to her personality, the literal crumbling, the eventual numbness; all of it was beautifully portrayed. It’s always difficult to accurately portray depression on-screen with authenticity because if one hasn’t suffered it, one will never get it. This portrayal felt real, despite being completely fictional and animated.
One underlying message that I seemed to gather from this beautifully crafted story is one of emotional awareness and mental health. Apart from the obvious where each Emotion is personified and each has a role in protecting us from getting hurt, the movie questions the purpose of Sadness. Like any depressed, sad sack caricature, she seemed too busy sulking and “feeling the weight of life’s problems” to provide much for Riley. All the other emotions seemed to be trying to prevent Riley from becoming sad, so really, why was Sadness there? In one wonderful, cathartic moment, the movie shows us that despite everything we think, every instinct that tells us not to, everyone telling you it’s not okay, it really is okay to feel sad. Every emotion has its purpose and it’s important for us to acknowledge and allow ourselves to feel them.
Even after this, can I really find any faults? Not really. My only large gripe is that the material is just a little too complicated for a younger audience. I may be underestimating kids nowadays, but I highly doubt that those in Pixar’s target demographic are really going to understand the complexity of something as abstract as emotion and mental processing. Though it does make a valiant effort to explain it in a pretty comprehensive manner.
Here’s the skinny: Inside Out is an emotionally powerful tale that’s both heartbreaking and heartwarming with a lot of love and humor in between. It’s cleverly scripted, lovingly performed, and beautifully animated. As a movie, it’s incredibly entertaining and touching, but above all else, it attempts to elucidate emotional awareness and mental health in a relatively accurate manner and does not feel, in the least bit, disingenuous. The concepts may be a tad too difficult for some of the younger audiences to grasp, but Pixar makes a good effort to explain it in a way that’s both accessible and interesting. Overall, this movie was made with a lot of love and it seemed pretty important to them that you could feel it.. I can say with confidence that it is one of Pixar’s best movies and it is certainly one of my favorite movies, but that’s just one man’s opinion.