Inside Out

Today, I’d like to review a classic Eve 6 song. Instead, you’re getting a movie review.

Throughout my movie-going career (sure, it’s a career; trust me), I learned to give Pixar a pass. No matter how young their movies appeared to skew, they would always have some quality that made them great movies.

Ratatouille had an insightful demonstration of how tastes combine and ended with a credo that all critics (would-be or otherwise) should take to heart. Toy Story 3 explored the heavy themes of change, growing old and even death that even “adult” movies rarely touch upon. Up had its first 10 minutes. Wall-e had the entire film. Cars… well, was unabashedly just for kids, but the rest are all right.

Suffice it to say, Pixar movies earned a reputation and with it, the trust of many more movie-goers than I. And that trust extends to the shorts that accompany every Pixar film. Many of them are completely unvoiced, and showcase some very masterful and creative visual storytelling. I think La Luna is my favorite and was easily better than the movie it was attached to, Brave, which committed the high crime of merely being funny. While a movie focusing on strong female characters is, sadly, groundbreaking, Pixar can’t rest profound on those laurels.

So how does Pixar’s latest short-long punch of Lava and Inside Out stack up?

Lava is pleasant little musical number that really ought to have bought into a bittersweet ending but went for the happy one. This was perhaps the first sign of trouble, that the movie was going to skew too young, too. And while the movie DID do that, the ending of Lava actually is a contrast to the moral of its accompanying film.

Inside Out has a lot going on, and it should! As you probably already know from the advertising, it’s about making a metaphor for the complex workings of a child’s mind during a time of crisis. It connects how people think through how they feel with five main emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust. It’s an odd selection, but they seem carefully picked to form a five-man band by way of a Four Philosophy Ensemble + The Conflicted.

While the idea is ripe for some Pixar profoundness, the movie mostly doesn’t deliver because it plays it too safe (more like Disney, less like Pixar). I’d put it somewhere between the funnier, but less profound Brave and the better-balanced Monsters Inc.. The movie spends far more time in 11-year-old Riley’s mind with bright colors and funny shapes than it does in the “real” world, where a story people can relate to is going on — that’s all people, adults and children.

The backdrop (or frontdrop in this case, I suppose) of the movie’s action is a potentially traumatic move from Minnesota to San Francisco thanks to a job opportunity for the father, which results in lost friends, a smaller, dingier home and less time spent with Dad.

It all culminates in a full-on emotional breakdown, illustrated by a low-key rebellion in her mind in which Sadness can’t help but infect everything with her emotion, especially memories created by Joy. The ensuing trainwreck of Riley’s emotional control center, apparently located in her brain and tasked with not only emotional responses but also memory creation and storage, ends up with Joy and Sadness getting stuck far from Headquarters (get it?), leaving Fear, Disgust and Anger to muddle through Riley’s daily life as best they can. It doesn’t go so well, as without the full team and certain key memories, whole aspects of Riley’s personality literally crumble away as she is unable to handle life.

Joy and Sadness must take the long way back to Headquarters, journeying through long-term memory storage and various brain functions including imagination, dream production and abstract comprehension (in a very good animation sequence) to complete the story’s exploration of the mind’s inner-workings.

I’m not really sure how to interpet it all, though. Whether the realm inside Riley’s mind is really steering the action as directly stated by the movie, when it’s also just an abstraction of the natural progression of things in the outside world. It very much so feels like the scripting process started with the real world story, with the inside action planned out afterward, as a retroactive explanation for everything Riley does.

The morals of the story can be seen coming a mile away: That it’s OK to be sad, and that your emotional state is a nuanced thing. Watching this movie was akin to reading “Ishmael,” I did it when I was too old, so I caught on to the points quickly but was stuck waiting while the main character got the explanation three more times before he could figure it out.

That being said, the lessons are cleverly previewed early on when we see that the lead emotion in Mom is Sadness, while Anger calls the shots with Dad in contrast to Marge Simpson with a haircut — I mean, Joy — being the boss of Riley.

This does lead to the best part of the movie, though: In the beginning of the credits, we take a peek into the heads of just about all the film’s characters, however minor. And it’s hilarious!

Verdict: Rental (3/5). A good movie that skews a little too young and a little too safe. It’s often clever, but it’s not up to the bar that Pixar has set for itself.

… So I saw this the same day as Ant-Man and said, “Geez, does every movie have to be in San Francisco?” I definitely give Inside Out props for having the more accurate portrayal of the city’s housing market.

… So are superhero names only hyphenated when it uses an animal? Ant-Man and Spider-Man, but not Iron-Man or Ice-Man?