Inside Out (2015)

As a child life was challenging especially when you’re an eleven year old child with cerebral palsy. It was challenging navigating a new school and making a new set of friends. My emotions always ran high because I was always trying to comprehend the world I occupied and the new decisions and minor bits of freedom I was given as a young adult. The struggle that I went through is perfectly normal and creatively illustrated in Pixar Animations newest feature Inside Out. The film focuses on eleven year old Riley and her emotions Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling). Riley is struggling with the fact that her family has had to move from Minnesota to Sacramento California because of her father’s new job.

The rules of the world that Riley’s emotions occupy is fairly simple. The emotions watch Riley have experiences and do their best to react accordingly which adds to Riley’s memories most of which are happy and joyous. Things change when Sadness and Joy get thrown out of headquarters when Joy tries to stop sadness from corrupting one of Riley’s core memories by making it sad. The best compliment I can give this film is that it perfectly visualizes the confusion and emotional stress young people go through as they age.

Pete Docter knows well how to build a colorful and inventive world from his previous work writing and directing Monsters, Inc.(2001). Every character has their own unique ways of responding to situations Riley finds herself in and their responses are hilarious. The character I find myself enjoying the most is Anger because the other characters have been around long enough to know how to push his buttons and his reactions are delightfully over the top.

Docter not only knows how to guide the audience through Riley’s emotional journey but also is intelligent enough to call on common childhood experiences for the emotions to respond to and as a result the film endears people to their own experiences and feelings allowing them to recall how they responded to those same scenarios creating nostalgia that is pretty much infused throughout the entire film making the experience of watching Riley’s journey an incredibly rich one.

The music by Michael Giacchino perfectly builds a theme for those moments when a child is discovering the world and what all of that could mean for them in the years and decades to come. The main theme is airy and simple but also recalls the different stages of evolution a person can go through as they have new experiences and develop new skills. In a sense the soundtrack is perfect for describing what it’s like to grow up and make memories.

The most touching moment of this film comes late in the story. The moment shows us that as human beings we all used to believe in something beyond our own comprehension and as we aged our imagination diminished and we grew up. Inside Out teaches us how we grow and change without punishing us for doing so. It’s quite a unique storytelling challenge that is pulled off masterfully by Docter and his talented staff.

I wish more films were like this one because when a movie teaches about how we lived it also subtly reminds of who we can still be. We can all be guided by our emotions but this movie reminds us we must never neglect our ability to imagine and explore new things in life as that is what helps us be extraordinary people inside and out.