Inside Out (June 19, 2015)

The film is set in the mind of a young girl named Riley, where five personified emotions—Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust—try to lead her through life as she and her parents adjust to their new surroundings after moving from Minnesota to San Francisco. This is a visually impressive movie with incredibly creative visualizations of abstract emotional and psychological concepts (and a cute art style to match). I kept being impressed by what the movie presented me with- a movie studio for dreams, memories stored in colorful, color coded bubbles, a literal train of thought- they all work wonderfully and are a joy to look at. The attention to detail is truly remarkable. It is a tall order to make an interesting film based around internal emotions with the setting largely in a young pre-teen girl’s mind, but Pixar mostly successfully pulls this off. However, I do have a few major problems with the film. The main emotions are all very unlikable- even given that they are simplistic renderings of complex emotions (it would have been too much for the movie to add more emotions to this already crowded cast, however). Even Joy and Sadness, the main two emotions who go on the journey to retrieve Riley’s core memories, while they do grow and come to respect each other’s important place in the young girl’s mind, they are, for the majority of the runtime, annoying. Joy is selfish and belittling while Sadness is lazy and insufferable. It is hard to care about the plights of wither of these protagonists. They truly mess up Riley’s mind causing her to spiral into depression. And that leads me to the core problem. Riley should have a say in her emotional state. Humans are not completely run by their emotions. They can control them, even suppress them. The movie desperately needed a representative for Riley’s interests, even if she is a character introduced at the end to make her a more well-rounded human being. Additionally, I felt the death of Bing Bong was only done to make the audience sad, emotionally manipulating with no lasting bearing on the narrative. I saw through this when I originally watched the film and so I did not mourn his passing. Overall, this movie is an extremely creative journey through the mind that, while majorly flawed, manages to keep me engaged by its sheer number of imaginative story elements.

Final Rating: 7/10