The Emotional Maturity Of INSIDE OUT
The summer movie season has been over for a couple of weeks now. We’re just entering Oscar season, where all those prestige pictures get their launch. These are the “important” movies, the ones that are supposed to get you thinking about life and people and society and all that. For people who aren’t into that, all the summer movies tend to hit DVD, Blu Ray and digital. If you couldn’t get to a movie theater this summer now’s your chance to catch up!
And there’s one movie from this summer that keeps invading my head. No, it’s not Jurassic World, king of the box office. It’s not Age of Ultron and the temptation to give it one more viewing to make sure there really was a reason I liked it instead of loving it. It’s not even Mad Max: Fury Road, which is probably the most thrilling theater experience of the year. It’s Inside Out, Pixar’s latest film (and the first of their two films this year).
On paper, Inside Out sounds like a mess of a movie waiting to happen. We follow the emotions inside a little girls head as her life plays out. That’s a tremendously difficult trick to pull off. Not only do you have to create two narratives that work, but two narratives that drive each other. Plus, you have to do it with a clarity that allows for your audience to follow along without getting lost. Pixar does both, and they do both very, very well.
The dual narratives end up giving Inside Out stakes. As Devin Faraci at Birth.Movies.Death puts it, they’re the greatest stakes in any movie this year. I mean, it’s not a movie about a cool dude saving a theme park from dinosaurs or a group of superheroes saving the world from a crazy robot, but it feels like it means more. And that’s because what’s at stake in Inside Out is small scale and personal. It’s wanting to see a little girl be happy.
That sounds backwards, but it’s how it works. It’s hard to care about scores of fictional people you barely see in a movie. You’re not there to see them, after all, you’re there to see the heroes. Now, Inside Out’s Riley isn’t the hero of the film, but she does feel consequential. You care about her, and a lot of that comes from Pixar putting her in relatable situations.
A lot of people understand the stress of uprooting your life and moving across country, even if they haven’t done it themselves. We realize that when we do that we’re saying goodbye to close friends and a way of life. That isn’t easy on anyone, but it’s especially not easy for a child. We see how Riley’s optimism for the move is quickly stomped out by reality. The house is kind of icky, her stuff hasn’t arrived yet, the food culture is different and her friends back home are moving on with their lives and, well, replacing her.
After all that, we get the dagger to the heart. The one universal thing that everyone understands and can feel: breaking down and crying on your first day at a new school. You’re the new kid, you’re already an outcast, and now you’re the one who breaks down and cries in front of everyone. All of that stuff gets you invested in Riley because you know what it feels like. You know embarrassment and loss and feeling lost. The stakes, however, come from where Riley goes from there.
That’s when Inside Out flips the switch. The Riley that we knew and were introduced to is wiped clean, her core memories lost and her Islands of Personality (more on this later) crumbling. Riley is having a crisis, she doesn’t know who she is anymore and it’s up to Joy and Sadness to keep Riley safe as Anger, Fear and Disgust attempt to not screw things up any worse.
The emotional maturity of Inside Out slowly reveals itself in this segment of the movie. It starts out simply, with Joy trumpeting that the best way to live is being happy as much as possible. Every memory needs to be happy, everyone needs to be happy, shove down the other emotions and focus on happiness! Wee! That’s not a healthy way to live, it can be counter productive and cause longterm problems.
Inside Out tackles this subtly, at first. After Riley breaks down, you get a glimpse into the minds of her parents. While Riley is controlled by Joy, her mother is controlled by Sadness and her father is controlled by Anger. Those small, subtle details still blew me away. This is an animated movie, a medium that people associate with children. Here we have a married couple where one spouse is ruled by sadness and the other by anger. This is a detail that’s likely to fly right over the heads of the majority of the people who see it.
As the film continues, Pixar continues to drop little details like that, peppering them in via jokes and gags and characters. There’s the forgotten imaginary friend, there’s a gag about why songs get stuck in your head, there’s a joke about how facts and opinions constantly get mixed up, there’s a Chinatown reference. All of this happens while Joy and Sadness go on their journey. Joy just doesn’t get the point of Sadness, why would anyone want to feel sad?
Eventually, we learn why. Sadness is needed to clear things away. It’s like the ash that a phoenix rises from. Sometimes you need to cry to flush things away and get to another state. The example that Inside Out uses is when Riley fails at hockey. She is really down and it turns into a very sad moment for her, but that paves the way for one of her happiest moments: her parents come to cheer her up, and then her teammates come to cheer her on. This takes place at the end of the film too, when Riley finally cries about her situation to her parents. That clears the path for her parents to help her through it with support, opening things up for a better tomorrow.
In the final moments of Inside Out, the film puts its emotional maturity on full display. Riley herself matures emotionally. Throughout the film, we see her life moments coded by a single emotion. This was a disgusting moment, this was a scary moment, this was angry, this was happy, this was sad. When she matures, she gains the ability to have more nuanced emotional moments. Now she can process moments that are both sad and happy. Or scary and angry. Or disgusting and angry.
On top of that, we see Riley’s improved Islands of Personality. They’ve grown and advanced, and some of them have combined together. They’re more complex, and her priorities in life are changing and evolving. Like the more nuanced emotionally-coded moments, we get another clear and simple way to understand that Riley has become a stronger, more mature person. She’s growing and you get the feeling that she’s going to turn out okay.
This is subject matter that could be presented in a very convoluted way. How do you broach the way emotions evolve as we age and grow? Part of Inside Out’s brilliance is the ability to clearly explain all of this. You understand how the emotions work, you understand the stakes, you understand this colorful world and you’re along for the ride. The simplicity in which the film tackles all of this is almost unexplainable. It has to be seen to be understood.
All of this comes together in what I’m increasingly convinced is a masterpiece. I didn’t feel this way when I first saw this movie, but Inside Out has taken my mind by storm all summer. It’s rolled around, infiltrating my thoughts and popping up in conversation randomly.
Inside Out is a film that has an emotional maturity that other films lack, it has a subtle edge that is likely to fly over the heads of people but is there for the people who want it. It has smarts, it has stakes and it has the ability to take complex ideas and whittle them down into something understandable. Go watch it.
Originally published at www.swiftfilm.com.
