Originally published February 2018

Since its inception, Pixar has had a pretty solid track record when it comes to making popular, successful, and, simply put, good movies. I loved Toy Story as a kid, and while the look of the film has not aged as gracefully as their later movies, it still holds up well enough. I also think you couldn't find many other movies that I consider closer to perfect than Wall-E and Up. Having watched each over a dozen times, they both still elicit a genuine positive response from me and I enjoy every minute of them. But not every Pixar movie has grabbed me the same way. Some films, like The Incredibles, are fun adventures that focus on themes I don't care about. Some films, like A Bug's Life, are filled with forgettable characters that tell an all-too-familiar story. And some films, like Cars, are just low points in a stellar film catalog. Pixar is at its best when it's telling a story with interesting characters and strong themes that aren't too forced. So, where does Inside Out, their emotional movie about emotions, fall?

Admittedly, my reception of Inside Out might have been negatively skewed due to the fact that I watched the film less than a mile from the symbol of the great empire that was profiting off of Pixar's fortune (Disneyland), and my cynical glasses were firmly fixed upon my face. However, I came away from it thinking that Inside Out, despite its strengths, was a middling affair that didn't pull me in much. I like it well enough, as the writing, animation, and direction are all better than your average film. However, Inside Out also has its fair share of faults that made me far less interested in the story, its characters, and its outcome.

Pros

• The writing is clever with some subtle humor and classic Pixar charm

• Lewis Black

• Some dilemmas and scenarios are relatable

Cons

• Convoluted metaphorical portrayal of the human mind gets in the way of telling a story

• Emotional moments were forced

• Pacing of the movie felt off, with the final act rushing to a conclusion as quickly as possible

• Most of the characters are intentionally one-note, which makes them uninteresting; also, with so many basic characters, none of them seem flushed out by the end, aside from Joy

Plot & Thoughts

According to Inside Out, when a person or animal is born and develops with age, avatars for their emotions form and manifest within the mind. The mind is a vast barren landscape with a giant pit in the center—for some reason—and a control center above it, with numerous buttons and panels like a Star Trek space vessel. Along the edges of this mind pit are various other metaphors for how a person thinks, including long-term memories, nightmare fuel, and abstract thought. The emotion avatars that sit in the control room determine the person's emotional perception of the world and their memories. They are also the main focus of the film.

Joy is the primary protagonist who is running the show inside the head of Riley, the secondary protagonist. Joy is accompanied by a small selection of the various emotions that operate in the minds of people, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear; all (mostly) take orders from her. Things are going great inside the mind of Riley, and Joy is running a perfectly tight ship until Riley and her family move from their home in Wisconsin to San Francisco and Riley has to go through all the typical troubles of readjusting to a new environment. This causes some chaos within her mental control room and, with a little contrived chaos caused by Sadness, suddenly Joy and Sadness are launched out of the control room and have to work together to make their way back before the inept Anger, Fear, and Disgust make Riley into a terrible person who makes bad decisions, or something.

That's not entirely true, but you could make that assumption based on what Pixar is giving you in this movie. The problem with their metaphorical representation of the mind is that it all gets pretty complicated, pretty quickly, if you think too much about it. But you have to think about it if you want all their jokes and references to make sense. Pixar is constantly asking you to make assumptions based on what you're seeing and hearing to go along with their metaphor, but if you start to go down that train of thought, you might find yourself thinking about a lot of irrelevant facts and questions that get in the way of enjoying the film. Cars had the same problem with how you end up wondering how everything works in the world when everyone is a car, but the world they inhabit looks like it was built for people, not to mention that they behave and do things like humans, like get tattoos, go cow-tractor tipping, and physically reproduce.

Inside Out's issue is that its story and its jokes are dependent on the idea that a person's mind is made up of different emotions controlling various computers in our brain, recording memories, and maintaining islands of personality. When Joy and Sadness are lost in the random libraries of long-term memory, trying to cross this arbitrary deep chasm back to the command room, as the islands of Riley's personality crumble and lose connection, an endless number of questions would arise. What do those personality islands do, other than simply operate as metaphors for her personality? If they crumble, does she die a little inside? What exactly causes an island to crumble in relation to what's happening in the control room? Who built all these computers and social structures within her head? Does Riley have no free will whatsoever? Since the mom had all female-type personalities in her head, and the dad had all male-type personalities inside his, why does Riley have both and what does that mean?

One question that came up and was never answered was "Why does Sadness feel compelled to touch everything and make it all sad?" Are we to assume this is the result of hormones, or is it just Riley's adolescence making Sadness more powerful and contagious? In order to enjoy Inside Out, you have to suspend your disbelief, you have to suspend your curiosity, and you just have to go with everything they give you. When you do, it can be funny and on the nose, like a joke about how facts and opinions are often mixed up in a person's head. Unfortunately, the movie is still dependent on its ability to explain every new idea or event in this world to make sense of the drama and tension of the situation in which Joy and Sadness find themselves.

When it's all over, there are still plenty of questions that remain unanswered, and the lessons learned by the various protagonists feel somewhat pointless, or contrived. Not to mention, the journey itself didn't seem all that enlightening. It was mostly like walking through a fun house of different rooms with various Pixar jokes, gags, and gimmicks until the climax where Joy finally understands that she shouldn't try to be such a controlling bitch and that "happy all the time" does not = healthy. It doesn't help that since there were so many characters who were all (intentionally) one-note. Having them grow into a two-note character doesn't feel like an accomplishment. The only one-note character I ended up liking was Anger, but that's primarily because it was voiced by one of my favorite stand-up comedians, Lewis Black, so I'm biased in that regard.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

In typical fashion, Pixar made another movie that is still better than most other movies out there. Even at their worst, Pixar's films manage to be watchable, even if they're bloated, convoluted, confusing, and contrived. The Pixar writing and charm managed to make Inside Out a better film than the average superhero movie that would earn just as much or more cash at the box office, but it pales in comparison to the film studio's greatest hits.

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