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Feelings in Technicolor: A Movie Review of 2015's Inside Out
by Lewis Robinson
Emotions drive human behavior, at least according to the 2015 film Inside Out from Pixar Studios. The lively and heartfelt collaboration between longtime Pixar director Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc, Up) and story artist Ronnie del Carmen (Wall-E, Brave) adroitly balances the sense of internal tumult of adolescence with the perspective of parents watching it all unfold.
Emotions Drive the Ship
The film personifies five human emotions as they exist within the mind of pre-teen girl Riley, voiced by Kaitlyn Dias. The emotions, Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger, and Fear, maintain Riley's memories, depicted as colored orbs, sending them to long-term storage while Riley sleeps.
Riley's "core memories," five defining memories from her childhood, take on the aspect of floating islands that provide the foundation of Riley's personality. The creative team consulted with emotions experts to design the landscape of Riley's mind. While the visualizations were simplified for the sake of narrative, they offer a lovely interpretation of a child-like emotional perspective on the world.
Sadness Steps In To Navigate
At the start of the film, 11-year-old Riley's family has just moved from Minnesota to San Francisco for her father's job. The transition proves difficult for the fun-loving hockey player: the house is uncomfortable, her father has no time to spend with Riley and the family's moving van winds up in Texas. One can imagine all of these stressors causing adrenal fatigue for the pre-teen, as she misses her Minnesota friends, and worries about school the next day. Exhausted, Riley finally falls asleep.
The next day, we see the hilarious chaos of her jumbled emotions as Joy bubbles with excitement about making new friends, while Fear (Bill Hader) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling) prepare for the worst. None of the crew notice Sadness (Phyllis Smith) touching happy memories and shifting their dominant feeling to sadness.
A core memory, formerly a joyful one, becomes sad, and Riley cries in front of the class. From that point on, the film becomes an adventure story, as Joy and Sadness attempt to restore Riley's joyful core memories, with an ending that hits just the right notes of nostalgia and earnestness.
Joy Lights the Way
Joy, voiced by Amy Poehler (SNL, Parks and Recreation), shines as a vibrant, sunshine-yellow character. Determined to keep, well, joy, the centerpiece of Riley's life, Joy takes the lead in Riley's emotional headquarters, gently resolving any conflicts between - or caused by - the other emotions.
Poehler's stellar comedic timing works well here: Joy's unceasing cheerfulness in the face of obstacles never becomes annoying or cloying. Rather, Poehler leverages the brilliant dialogue - and writes some of her own! - to achieve a delicate balance of true affability and sincere empathy for the less joyful characters.
Humor Keeps Us Honest
The other emotions, Sadness, Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling) also light up the screen with their perfectly tuned responses to the complicated situations Riley encounters. They're lovable, even when they're wrong, and screenwriters Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley thoughtfully weave the plot and dialogue together to emphasize the message of positive psychology.
While in charge of Riley's personality, Fear, Disgust and Anger cause rifts between Riley and her parents and friends. The exchanges between the human characters stand out for their authenticity and laugh-out-loud humor. In one scene, we see inside the emotional centers of Riley's parents, which is both hilarious and uncomfortably realistic.
Growing Up is More Sweet Than Bitter
Docter began pondering the concepts of emotional development when he noticed his formerly happy and carefree daughter developing a more serious and introspective demeanor. Docter started wondering what was going on inside her head, and so the premise of Inside Out was born.
Thanks to his nostalgia about his daughter growing up, we can follow along with Joy and Riley as they learn the bittersweet and beautiful lesson that emotions come in more than one color. Joy and Riley discover that though our memories frame our histories, those memories don't have to define our identities.
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