Heady Concepts: Inside Out

It's an attention-getting premise: The characters of Inside Out are the actual emotions within the mind of a young girl: Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness. When the girl’s family moves from their reassuring home in Minnesota to a new life in San Francisco, the emotions run riot. 

The emotions are the caretakers of young Riley’s memories, golden orbs, the most profound of which are identified as Core Memories, which help shape the internal free-floating Islands that make up a different aspect of the girl’s personality. Joy (Amy Poehler) is the dominant emotion, keeping all the other emotions in check through unbridled cheerleader perkiness, with Sadness (Phyllis Smith) being the biggest threat to harmonious well-being.

If Sadness touches a happy memory of the past, it becomes irreversibly sad. As new memories and potential Core Memories are made, Joy has a harder time keeping Sadness from influencing things, until both Joy and Sadness are accidently hurled into the deep recesses of Riley’s mind, leaving Anger, Fear and Disgust in charge, with Riley’s Islands of personality in peril of disintegration.

It’s an ambitious and lofty conceit, and Inside Outhas reaped an incredible avalanche of rave reviews. It’s been ranked among Pixar’s very best, and I was excited to experience the inventiveness of this unique premise. Pixar just wows me, and I really have to hand it to Pete Docter and the team here. It’s a truly inventive and dazzling film that actually has a lot to say. It’s challenging and ambitious and kudos to everyone at Pixar for their work here. I have to think that Inside Out is capable of being tremendously helpful to any young person who’s felt overwhelmed at the prospect of getting a grip on their feelings, and by making abstract emotional states like Anger and Sadness into tangible beings, it’s easy to imagine the film being useful as a therapy tool. The quality and effort and substance on display is of the highest caliber.

Unfortunately, there’s just something about Inside Out that just never clicked for me. While I admire it like crazy, I can only do so from a  distance, because by the very nature of the film’s premise, the characters were just too abstract to resonate. I felt really detached from them – even Joy – and never felt invested in what they were struggling to achieve. While the story is designed with high-minded purpose, the environment of the mind is too often depicted as a bleak, nearly apocalyptic wasteland. With elements like “The Abyss” of obsolete memories, and an abandoned, clown-like imaginary friend (Richard Kind), there’s a real melancholy that saturates Inside Out’s plot to the point where the cumulative mood is more depressing than uplifting. Sadness is definitely a drag, and the images of crumbling personalities sinking into darkness is a bleak one that the film’s admittedly upbeat ending never really succeeds in purging.

While the film is an amazing achievment on many levels, it’s just not one I was able to genuinely enjoy. It’s so conceptual and rife with allegory that I always felt like an obsever, eager for the story to wrap it up so I find some emotional rescue back in the real world. There were moments of gloom and sadness in WALL-E, but you always felt completely immersed and enchanted, and the characters felt alive, despite their mechanized natures. Inside Outis ultimately too abstract and maudlin to be counted among Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Wall-E, Up and The Incredibles as Pixar’s best. For me, it’s one those films that while I’m happy to acknowledge as great, I just couldn’t enjoy.