THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS OF THE DISCUSSED FILM. READERS DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
You ever wonder what’s going inside your head? Inside Out has an answer for you.
PLOT
The 2015 film by Pixar Animation Studios follows a group of five live emotions in the head of a young girl named Riley. The five basic emotions are: Anger, Disgust, Fear, Joy & Sadness. In Rylie’s head, her memories are stored as colored orbs and get sent into long term memory each night. Her core memories make up islands within her personality (Family, Friendship, Honesty, Goofball & Hockey) and although Joy leads the other emotions to keep Rylie happy, she looks at Sadness as a burden to the point where she tries to limit her influence. The story’s present shows Rylie to be 11 years old, now moving from Minnesota to San Diego with her parents due to her father getting a new job there. The transition would be poor at first due to the new house being cramped and eating a local pizza containing the ingredient of the vegetable broccoli she dislikes. On top of that, their belongings got misplaced in Texas and won’t make it to their new home for weeks. The first day of school only gets worse because when Rylie introduces herself in class, Sadness retroactively saddens joyous memories and causes her to cry in class, which creates the first sad core memory. When she and Joy dispute over it, they get themselves sucked into Long Term where the other memories are stored. There, they encounter Rylie’s imaginary friend Bing Bong who wants to reconnect with her. Anger, Disgust & Fear try to maintain Rylie’s happiness without Joy, but the results would be so disastrous she’d become distant with her parents & friends, and the personality islands would start crumbling onto Memory Dump where all can fall into non existence and become forgotten. When passing through the likes of Imagination Land and the dangerous shortcut of Abstract Thought, they intend to reach the Train of Thought in order to return to headquarters and pick up where they left off. They don’t get to leave yet as Rylie being asleep prevents the train from moving. When passing through Dreamland productions, Bing Bing gets sent to the Subconscious for trying to remind Rylie of him. Needing to wake her up, Joy & Sadness do so by summoning her frightening fear of clowns to occur in a dream. Feeling out of options, Anger uses the idea of running away from her parents and go back to Minnesota where she’ll regain happiness. As this idea commences and another island falls apart, it causes the Train of Thought to crash. Joy tries to make it back to headquarters through a broken tube, but chooses to abandon Sadness to prevent her saddening any more core memories. Despite this, the tube breaks again and she falls into the Memory Dump. Bing Bong tries to save her, but ends up falling in with her. Feeling hopeless, Joy looks back at the core memories before becoming forgotten. However, she realizes how essential Sadness is to gain true happiness. Motivated to set things right, she calls for Bing Bong’s imaginary Rocket to get out of Memory Dump. They try leaving together but are too heavy to carry both, leading to Bing Bong making the selfless act and be forgotten to allow Joy to save her. Joy finds Sadness and are able to make it back to headquarters together to undo Rylie running away. With Anger’s causing the emotion console to be disabled and put Rylie into depression, Sadness’ touch summons reactivation and prompts her to go back to her parents. When she tells them how much she misses her old life, her parents cheer her up in sharing they miss it too. In a moment of reconciliation, new personality islands form to represent her acceptance. The film ends in a time jump taking place a year later, showing Rylie more comfortable than ever with her new life in San Francisco, while the emotions gain a newly-expanded console by mind workers that’ll give them enough room for all to work together.
THOUGHTS
With 2015 being 20 years after Pixar made their theatric debut with Toy Story, which became the successful franchise juggernaut as time went on, people started to wonder if this animated studio can still pick up the pace. Well as a fan, it makes proud to see there are still stories worth sharing. From start to finish, Directors Pete Docter & Ronnie del Carmen keep us hooked with the most inventive narrative done with a thought that sounded so simple when first saying aloud and expand from there. The human mind has a lot to explore, especially in childhood years, so they made the most fun out of it with every detail shown. All the colors that bring life to Rylie's mind is spectacular as it represents creativity comes in all shapes and sizes. The biggest laughs I had throughout involved how different emotions are for other people. Like how Rylie's mom (Diane Lane) has a Sadness in charge and appears to be well organized while her dad (Kyle MacLachlan) has an Anger in charge which makes them pretty clueless. And for them like everyone else, they're different based on the hairstyle alone from the head or face. And the animals only differ from the colors. The simpleness of it alone makes it effectively hilarious. It was one thing to giggle on how organized Dreamland Productions is for overnight shoots and relating to the dislike of broccoli, but the real kicker that had me fall off my seat laughing was when the young boy freezes upon meeting Rylie while his emotions freak out inside due to never preparing for such a moment. Putting aside all the laughs, I felt this was a story on how one must always be able to wotk through what makes you uncomfortable rather than avoid it because if you don't even put an effort, you'll never be able to mentally grow. From the voice alone, Kaitlyn Dias showed Rylie to be a child confused with all the sudden changes going on past her control and didn't know how to deal with it. Once she confessed on how homesick she got overtime, she was able to feel content with it all for the time being. This mini-crisis would've not happened had it not been for the basic emotions trying so hard to be organized. Amy Poehler is a delight as Joy who portrays her to be the only one capable to determined on maintaining order. She is so obsessed with keeping Rylie happy because she feels not having happiness at every second risks the possibility of having a desirable life and she doesn't want to risk that. You respect her good intentions, but it unknowingly makes her selfish when cooperating with everyone but Sadness. Phyllis Smith may portray said emotion as one who acts way too pessimistic, but means well when curious. The conflict might have been avoided if she listened to Joy on the first day of the new school, but it was bound to happen because in reality, sadness is what paves the way to reach out for help and give validation for happiness to exist. There really is no joy without sadness and both realized that in their own journey. As for the other emotions, Bill Hader nails it in living up to the name of Fear because he is ten times more overprotective for Rylie to where he wouldn't even know what to do half the time. For the most part, he'll try to be a voice of reason until the tension is too much to bare. Mindy Kaling showed Disgust to be very stubborn when it comes to protecting Rylie because she's got a lot of opinions that she passes on and means well no matter how skeptical she acts. Again, I'm on her side when disliking broccoli but that's just one opinion. Lewis Black owns it in making Anger visibly the most temperamental of emotions because he believes Rylie deserves better than what's given which is a relatable feeling. He makes the tough call to run away because he wasn't sure how else for her to be happy when there wasn't enough time to adjust to San Francisco and the absence of Joy made it easier for him to decide rather than think it over. Thankfully, there was luck on all sides when it came to setting things right before it could've been all too late. Since Rylie is still young, this is only the beginning of her problems and no matter how harder things will get, her emotions will sort it out and resolve them all. This film holds up very well on its own, but even great stuff like this have issues I picked up on during re-watches. Like ain’t it weird Joy doesn’t try to stop Anger from pulling the lever over the first time having broccoli? If she’s so obsessed with Rylie being happy, she should’ve put an effort on that she is with Sadness. And how come it appears that Rylie doesn’t know about moving to San Francisco until the last minute? I mean if Joy is sure nothing can go wrong, she should’ve prepared for this possibility. And why is it that for Rylie’s parents, their emotions are one gender (Dad’s all male and Mom’s all female) yet Rylie herself has coed? Of all things to further explain about this film’s take on emotions, it’s that. It was a big laugh on how the kind workers throw in the Triple Dent Gum commercial memory to piss off the emotions, but shouldn’t that make her happy? If that’s so catchy and it doesn’t upset her the way it does for Anger, that should’ve paved the way for Joy to get back up to headquarters. I don’t even understand how she got convinced to tryout hockey again after the attitude she gave her parents. I know we gotta focus on how Joy & Sadness reach common ground, but the hockey scene should’ve been more clarified. And how did the mind workers move so fast to take Bing Bong to the Subconscious? If there was some kind of elevator, they should’ve shown that. Also, Joy could’ve lifted the balloon cage if she didn’t want to wake up Jangles. I know she’s gotta be inspired to wake up the clown, but I’m sure she still would’ve thought of it with more insistence from Sadness. Ignore this, then you’ll still love the movie for what it is. In conclusion, Inside Out is Pixar’s best film from the 2010s for sparking a new take on originality that maintains its heart. If animation is your favorite genre, see this film now.
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