Another collaboration from Disney and Pixar, Inside Out is, in one word, CREATIVE. It's no secret that Pixar's movies are good at playing with viewers' emotion. The opening sequence of Up? Toy Story 3 farewell scene? But Inside Out is something... different.
---SPOILER ALERT---
Inside Out follows a story of the 5 main emotions in the mind of a young girl named Riley from the day she was born. Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear. Their job, is to control Riley's emotion and memories in life. All through her childhood, Joy is the main controller of Riley's emotion and character. All Riley's core memories, which build her personality, are dominated by Joy.
The problem starts when Riley and her parents move from their hometown in Minnesota to San Francisco. Sadness starts to touch Riley's happy memories, which are presented in the form of golden orbs like bowling balls, and it causes them to turn blue. This makes Joy cast Sadness aside, to prevent her from making more sad memories.
Unfortunately, Sadness accidentally causes Riley to cry on her first day at the new school. This major experience turns into a core memory, but this time it's a blue, sad memory. Joy tries to prevent this core memory from reaching the central hub, but everything goes to chaos and ends up with Joy and Sadness being accidentally sent away from their headquarter to the long-term memory space. The adventure of these two, trying to go back to the HQ starts here.
In the HQ, Anger, Disgust and Fear try to fill in Joy's absence but they only manage to make Riley become distant from her parents and friends. Meanwhile Joy and Sadness' journey is not easy since Riley's personality is falling down one by one, making it hard for them to go back to the HQ.
All attempts done by the remaining 3 emotions in the HQ only leads to a depressed, numb Riley, shown by her "emotion console panel" turning dark and unresponsive to command. Up to the point where, no thanks to Anger's idea, Riley steals her Mom's wallet to buy a bus ticket back to Minnesota. But before her bus leaves the city, Joy and Sadness makes it back to the HQ and, surprise, Joy lets Sadness take control for once, remove Anger's idea, reactivate the console and Riley goes back home.
From that point, Joy and Sadness and the rest of the crew work together to create emotion and memories. The orbs show more complex mix color, instead of one solid color, showing a more complex emotions as Riley grows. New core memories, and new personality. She adapts well in SF and all is well.
---SPOILER ENDS---
I went to see this movie with such a high expectation, due to praised reviews from my friends and the net. And I'm not disappointed.
The one thing that I like the most from Inside Out is how it explains how brain, emotions, memories, thoughts, basically everything inside our head work, so very easily.
The opening line of this movie goes like this,
"Do you ever look at someone and wonder what is going on inside their head?"
And that's exactly what this movie is about. I mean, words like, subconscious, abstract concept thoughts, long-term memory, memory dump, are not the words I'd expect to be in a children animated movie, let alone be understood. But the way Inside Out presents those complicated concept, it's brilliant. Some examples:
- The headquarter, is our conscious mind, where everything is processed
- The long-term memory space keeps every single information and memory we get everyday, pictured as bowling-ball-like-orbs l in the movie
- However, after a while, some memories that are not-so-needed will be dumped into the memory dump, or simply put, be forgotten
- Subconsciousness is shown as a deep dark dungeon-like prison where our fears are stored
- During Joy and Sadness' journey back to HQ, they also encountered areas like, imagination land, dream production studios, and the abstract concept room, which is another brilliant stuff by itself.
- Also a special shoutout to Bing Bong, Riley's forgotten childhood imaginary friend. He's a mixture of cat's tail, elephant's head, pink cotton candy body, and dolphin. What's not to love? Also he's the actual hero.
The second thing I love from Inside Out is the message. We are shown from the very beginning how Joy is the leader of the group. Intentionally or not, she dominates Riley's emotions to the point where she casts aside Sadness. We rarely see other emotions take control of the console panel when Joy is around. However, in the end we see that everyone is working together, each get their own space in the bigger upgraded console. Riley's emotions and memories later become a mix of colors, not just one color dominating the orbs.
This goes to show, to teach viewers, that we can't just put aside what we're feeling just because it's not a positive feeling. In the ending, we learn that Sadness is actually important, she gives signal to others when Riley needs help. Acknowledgement of "negative" feeling is important.
To quote Meredith Grey, from Grey's Anatomy season 4,
"Not everybody has to be happy all the time. That's not mental health. That's crap."
I also love the graphic and color of this movie. It's very on point. The SF is shown in dull colors, the house, the pizza place, very much like Riley's reluctance towards the city. On the other hand, inside her mind, everything is candy-colored. Bright, cheerful, reminds me of Wreck It Ralph a lot.
One last thing I really enjoy. This maybe personal liking, but I like the subtlety of how it's actually relatable not only to younger viewers but also to adults.
- The scene where the console panel turn grey and unresponsive, I believe that it really describes what depression is like. Numb, apathetic, badly-reasoned actions but no way to realize that they are bad
- The emotions of Riley's mom and dad
- See the difference? Mom's emotion is lead by sadness, while Dad's emotion is lead by anger. Any guess what this might mean?
To conclude, I give Inside Out 4.5/5 noise. It's brilliant, it's different, it's complex and simple at the same time, it's handled very nicely, and it's definitely enjoyable.
