Inside Out (2015) ***/*****
Pixar’s movies have a great reputation for putting just as much focus on character and emotion as they do comedy or adventure, which generally allows them to be a cut above the other animated features that hit the multiplexes. Their characters are deep, three-dimensional, and they develop over the course of the film. Their plots spring out of character, rather than the other way around. The newest movie to come from the studio, Inside Out, adheres to these unwritten rules. This time around, however, the focus on character is so great that a little bit of tunnel vision appears to take place, and the film suffers as a result. Here, the internal life of the protagonist is all that the filmmakers seem to be concerned with, so things like story and humor fall by the wayside to the point where you start to wonder if the studio as a whole isn’t starting to split into two extreme approaches — making either vapid sequels to their big hits like Cars 2 or Monsters University, or original works like this that are going to become increasingly dour to the point where you can’t imagine kids enjoying them at all.
Of course, that sort of defeatism is definitely a reactionary response to the fact that Pixar hit a high with the back-to-back-to-back release of Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up that they’re likely never going to be able to live up to again, and there’s a certain disappointment that always comes from the realization that any magic in the world isn’t going to be able to stay. In truth, Inside Out is a perfectly acceptable animated movie that wouldn’t be viewed as a disappointment if it came from any other studio. It tells the story of a young girl named Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) whose young life reaches a crisis point when her very acceptable life in Minnesota is interrupted by a sudden move to San Fransisco, which isn’t a burg that gels too well with her sensibilities. Well, that’s half of the story.
The other half happens inside Riley’s head, where her emotions are personified as animated little creatures who appear to have the job of controlling her actions. There’s Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Fear (Bill Hader), a group who get thrown into crisis mode once the big move happens — to the point where Joy and Sadness find themselves whisked off to the far recesses of Riley’s brain and have to find a way to get back to the control center before the girl’s emotional meltdown leads to her losing all sense of self. While the drama of a kid having to move to a new town is fairly mundane and small, turning her mind and emotions into a world fraught with danger and disaster theoretically opens the whole story up to be cinematic and exciting. As a concept, it’s promising.
The problem is that the film’s execution never quite lives up its promise. Instead, it kind of plays out like an extended episode of Herman’s Head, which was a fairly lame Fox sitcom from the early 90s that utilized a similar format of one-dimensional characters bickering in a brain, though in a live-action, sitcom format. Perhaps the personification of emotions is just a doomed concept, never to reach its full potential. The reason it fails here is that the bulk of the film’s drama and tension is put on the shoulders of the world that exists inside of the protagonist’s head, while the outside world where she actually exists and things are actually happening to her is the one that you want to care about, because the internal world is just too goofy to take seriously.
What’s the story being told here if you just view it from the outside world that Riley is living in? A young girl has a happy life one place, she then has to move to a different place, which makes her sad for a while, but then she decides to get over it. There’s really no story there, so it’s the drama that’s going on in her mind that needs to hook us. The problem with that is that the makeup of the mind as it’s represented here — the geography of it that the living emotions have to navigate, the relationship between the emotions and memories and how their harvesting of memories keeps the whole thing running — it’s all just too vague and random to ever actually mean anything. The rules of the world don’t feel consistent. It not only feels like things could suddenly change at a moment’s notice, in order to cater to wherever the writer needs the plot to go, but basically the entire plot is made up of things randomly changing or new stuff popping up, so that very thing happens constantly. There’s a deus ex machina around every corner. New locations pop up when they need to, new ways to get around do the same, and — worst of all — new characters show up out of nowhere. I say worst of all as I refer to Bing Bong (Richard Kind), Riley’s imaginary friend who appears in the brain world and helps Joy and Sadness navigate their way back to the control center. He’s the worst, to the point where he plays as a parody of the annoying comic relief character who always shows up in these animated movies, except he’s not supposed to be a parody, they’re serious about him. Ugh.
And what are we to think of this relationship that Riley has to her emotions? Does she control what they do or do they control what she does? It feels like they control what she does, which basically makes her a big weird robot that they travel around in and control, like that big, weird, bald robot that Krang used to ride around in back on the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. If we’re supposed to care about Riley and what happens to her, then she can’t just be a weird robot. That leaves us with the emotions as the characters who we’re supposed to care about — and as we’ve already said, they’re sitcom-level caricatures whose stories are concerned with mostly ill-defined nonsense.
All of this stuff adds up to a disconnect that makes it hard to really get invested in Inside Out the way that it was effortless to get invested in something like co-writer/directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson’s last film, Up. These are guys who have made something as good as Up though, so what they come up with here isn’t all bad. There are a couple of emotional moments that resonate, a handful of jokes that produce legitimate giggles, and the voice cast is pretty great down to a person (okay, so Kind was a little bit much as Bing Bong), so there’s enough to get you through the movie without feeling like you’re being too put out. Inside Out isn’t unpleasant, it’s just completely unremarkable, and Pixar has built its brand on being remarkable.
