Ever since Toy Story (1995), Pixar has been the world's front-runner when it comes to digital animation. About once every one or two years for the past 20 years, the studio led in part by John Lasseter, releases a new film. Their worst are still enjoyable family entertainment, while their best are unquestionable masterpieces. After seeing it twice this week, I'm happy to say, that Inside Out falls into the second category. In fact, it might even be their finest work to date.
The film was directed by Pete Docter, the genius behind Pixar's Up (2009) and Monster's Inc (2001). He had the idea watching his young daughter grow up... He asked himself what was going on inside her head...
And so this film mostly takes place inside the head of an 11 year-old girl, Riley. The five beings in charge of her life are named after emotions: Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling). Her memories are code-colored according to the emotion responsible, and she has about half a dozen of core-memories, which are the foundations of her interests in life.
But on top of watching the crimes and misdemeanors of her emotions, we get to see their concrete impacts on the girl's life. She started growing up in Minnesota and everything was going all too well. But one day, her gets a new job, and the family moves to San Francisco. She has to leave her neighborhood and her friends, but she's mostly excited to start her new life. Of course, that's before Sadness gets in the way, and does a few crucial mistakes involving the core-memories that shatter Riley's happiness, leaving her on a downfall towards depression. And it's up to Joy to save Riley's well-being and stop her from acting on a senseless idea implanted by Anger....
Joy's journey goes through all of Riley's mind. And most of the pleasure of watching this films is contemplating how its creators represented abstracts concepts. Her memories are stored in a maze with a shape that evokes the brain's convolutions. It's actually very well thought out, notice how the short term memories are transported into long term memories only while the girl is asleep... And her dreams are made in a Hollywood-like studio, with written scripts and sometimes talentless actors, so her inner companions react to nightmares the same way we do about scary movies. There's even a hilarious sequence involving Miss Unicorn, her mind's Marilyn Monroe.
Perhaps children will be more appealed by it, but Pixar has proven many times before to have a way of giving the parents so many subtle winks, it's hard not to fall in love under it's charm no matter how old you are or what genre you're into. Younger children will be excited for these colorful characters to go on an adventure, while a grown-up could prize himself for catching a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to Roman Polanski's Chinatown. Everybody is a winner. Still, working on a project that is only conceptualized with the abstract is insanely hard. The film took more that five years to make, and demanded multiple rewrites and combinations of characters. The emotions were finally created based on specific shapes. For instance, Sadness's appearance is meant to resemble a star, while Fear looks like a raw nerve and so on.
All that shows that Riley is powerless when it comes to her imagination or ambitions, which are fueled by her emotions. She acts like a soulless puppet, under the command of immature beings that live in her head. Twice in the movie, and always played out for comedy, we get to take a peek in her parent's mind. Even if mom and dad were not exactly on the same wavelength, I was surprised to see how well an adult's emotions are organized and working together as a team to attain a common goal. Maybe growing up is actually getting all the voices inside our head to say the same thing.
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