Inside Out is vintage Pixar. After
spending a few years mired
in an adolescent funk, the studio has emerged with a take on the
coming-of-age story that’s as clever as it is poignant and that suggests a newfound
sense of maturity. For his follow-up to, well, Up, director Pete Docter,
along with a pitch-perfect voice cast and Pixar’s usual team of genius
animators, explores the uncertainties of growing up and the complex interplay
between emotion and memory by delving into the mind of an 11-year-old girl. The
result is a film of such piercing yet exquisite intimacy that writing this
review seems like a fruitless endeavor, since no words could adequately convey
that feeling. The sensation of watching Inside
Out lingers long after details about the plot and particular jokes begin to
fade.
Pixar’s latest work is most
reminiscent not of any Disney or animated movie, but of last year’s Boyhood. While Richard Linklater’s flick
offers a more anxious and ambivalent outlook on life, an attitude concisely
captured by Patricia Arquette’s wrenching final line, both movies are as much
about parenting as they are about being a kid, in part because their makers are
unavoidably coming from that perspective, and with their white, middle-class,
presumed-to-be-heterosexual protagonists, they largely adhere to popular
imaginings of childhood as happy, suburban havens of innocence. These
romanticized depictions are so often reproduced by Hollywood they’ve taken on an
almost mythic status, seemingly grounded more in a particular set of ideals
than in reality.
However, both Inside Out and Boyhood have more on their minds than nostalgia.
By making the children at their centers distinctive and well-rounded enough to
feel like individuals instead of archetypes, they sidestep many of the
potential pitfalls and clichés that frequently doom coming-of-age tales. You
don’t have to share Riley’s passion for hockey to relate to the meaningful role
it plays in her life, just as you didn’t need to agree with Mason’s teenage
existential musings to recognize that they are his way of making sense of the
world around him and cementing his own increasingly independent identity. These
movies succeed, in other words, because they understand that art taps into
universal sentiments – namely, people’s capacity for empathy – most effectively
when it portrays specific, not vague circumstances; they simply tell their own
stories rather than attempting to cater to all possible audience members.
Inside Out especially manages to feel both deeply personal and widely
accessible by exposing how its narrative has been engineered to produce
particular emotional responses at given moments. All storytelling is, on some
level, based around this kind of manipulation, each character and event
carefully designed to trigger a desired intellectual or emotive reaction, but
most of the time, the goal is to create such an immersive world and to make
those behind-the-scenes calibrations subtle enough that audiences won’t notice
the strings being pulled. In fact, Boyhood
is a perfect example of this, taking a decidedly understated approach as it
relies on a series of small moments that seem mundane when standing alone but
gain a surprising amount of pathos when considered all together; it trusts
viewers to make the right connections. Inside
Out, on the other hand, never disguises its intentions, essentially pulling
back the curtain on Pixar’s creative process and explaining how the studio has
become so skilled at tugging heartstrings. The filmmakers control the
audience’s emotions in much the same way that Joy, Anger and co. control
Riley’s. I could practically feel them pushing buttons and turning dials in the
hopes of generating excitement, laughter, tears, but rather than reducing the
emotional journey at the center of the story to something cheap or inauthentic,
this directness actually makes the sentimentality come across as more honest
than if it had been buried under layers of irony or restraint. If a magic trick
works, explaining the mechanics of how it was done doesn’t necessarily make it
any less magical.
In addition to the innovative
screenplay (which arguably leans more toward drama than comedy but still packs
in plenty of wit and jokes that sometimes flash by so quickly you might miss
them) and a musical score by Michael Giacchino that alternates between lively,
jazzy cues and aching, Thomas Newman-like minimalism, credit for the movie’s
effectiveness goes in large part to the voice actors. Though everyone from
Mindy Kaling as Disgust and Lewis Black as Anger to Richard Kind as Riley’s
imaginary friend, Bing Bong, is spot-on, Amy Poehler and The Office’s Phyllis
Smith are especially well-suited to their roles as Joy and Sadness,
respectively. Initially, Poehler seemed like too obvious of a choice to play a
character defined by relentless positivity, but as the film unfolds, she finds
new depths and nuances to the persona she honed for years on Parks and Rec, her voice bringing out
notes of melancholy and sensitivity that she never quite hit while portraying
Leslie Knope. Smith gives Inside Out
its heart, lending just enough sweetness to her role that Sadness’s uncertainty
and pessimism hit home but not so much that it tips into self-loathing or turns
the character into the butt of a joke.
The importance of Sadness to the
narrative is ultimately what makes Inside
Out so endearing. Where most children’s films position grief and discontent
as temporary, often destructive or shameful conditions, Docter and his fellow
writers argue that sadness is not only perfectly natural and healthy, but also
constructive, essential to the process of both growing up and being human in
general. In a world where culture seems to prefer depicting kids as constantly
smiling, angelic miracles that exist to make parents feel better about
themselves than as real people, I can think of few other movies, excepting
Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are adaptation,
that are so keenly aware of how unhappy children can be and that validate those
feelings instead of dismissing or downplaying them. It’s not exactly a surprise
that Pixar understands the nature of catharsis, recognizing that it is
generated by a combination of happiness and sorrow and that, therefore, one
cannot exist without the other. That complicated, almost indescribable feeling
is even more fundamental to Inside Out
than any of the studio’s previous works; here, catharsis isn’t just a hoped-for
response to the story’s resolution – it is
the resolution.
The stakes of Inside Out are summed up in a single
line of dialogue, spoken by Joy: “All I ever wanted was for her to be happy”.
While this struggle might seem insignificant compared to the dozens of
apocalypses staged in theaters around the globe every summer, Docter transforms
Joy and Sadness’s mission to make Riley happy into a suspenseful adventure with
as much tension as if they were trying to save the world. In a way, they are.
They’re saving her world.
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