Inside Out (2015)

Inside out is a movie about a young girl who is forced to move away from her home for some reason we never really understand. Her family moves into a new house far away from her old friends and hobbies. She is having trouble coping and becomes increasingly frustrated by this. The gimmick though is that the movie takes place mostly inside her head. Each person has 5 little creatures that represent various emotions that control how we feel at any given time. Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. They can manipulate their person and try to steer them towards the emotion they feel is appropriate at that time. They can also show them past memories or even change how that person perceives a memory if they want. Basically they control that person and manipulate them as they see fit.

Joy and Sadness are removed from the control center and spend the majority of the movie trying to make it back there. Riley, their person, has lost her core memories which make up her personality. Joy and Sadness are in possession of them and are trying to return them in hopes that it will “fix” Riley and her current issues.

The movie itself is more of a comedy thought it does tend to deal with rather heavy situations. At one point the girl tries to run away for example, and they have a re-occurring joke about a dog dying. Trying to mix the dark humor into the movie was not a horrible idea, one of their main characters is perpetually depressed after all. However the execution of it was a miss for me. The joke about the dead dog for example, I didn’t care for it. Yes it made sense given the context, but that doesn’t make it enjoyable. We are presented with an imaginary friend at one point we are supposed to care about. But we see him kill another imaginary character as a gag. There is even a scene in the end where Joy uses dozens of imaginary characters as a ladder while sentencing each and every one of them to their deaths. The logic was they were all willing to die for Riley, so why not allow them to if it benefited her. The movie constantly tries to get you to care about these characters, but then it gives you reason to dislike them. The comedy fell flat, and with the majority of the characters being unlikable, I had trouble find something to enjoy in this one.

I did enjoy a few of the emotions, Anger, Fear, and Disgust were all entertaining for the most part. They also had the smaller roles so that may be why. I also liked the various creature that populated the rest of Riley’s head. There was a scene where somebody forced her to listen to a commercial jingle over and over again. It kept popping up during the movie and it was the only thing to make me constantly laugh. It was a shame the rest of the movie tried too hard to be so unique or it could have all been enjoyable. We had prolonged scenes dealing with abstract thought, or simply showing how random a 11 year olds thoughts are. They bogged the film down and added in very large boring spans of time. The animation was decent, but the overall design of the characters and sets left a lot to be desired.

Everybody told me how amazing this movie was when it came out. After seeing it I can see the potential for that, but it failed to deliver that type of experience. The characters were interesting, as was the story. But they were all very annoying and just unlikable. Sadness was the only real likable one of the main group, but that wasn’t enough to carry the film either. I expected better from Pixar, this one was very disappointing. I couldn’t even recommend renting it after my viewing. Just pass on it and move on.