It is a truism that whenever a movie promises to take you “inside the mind” of a serial killer/psychopath/police detective/cannibal rodeo clown, it doesn’t really fulfill its promise. Cinema, especially in comparison with novels, is a remarkably external narrative medium.
Aside from an occasional voice-over, it’s rare for them to truly take you inside the mind of anyone at all. You get to watch what characters say and do, but not how they think.
“Inside Out,” on the other hand, literally takes viewers inside the mind of, well, a girl from Minneapolis as she and her parents embark on a big move to a home in San Francisco.
This may not sound quite as thrilling as serial killers or rodeo clowns, but it is far richer and more satisfying.
“Inside Out” transforms the everyday inner life of a girl into a wildly inventive fantasy adventure that is, somewhat improbably, also one of the most psychologically nuanced films ever to hit the big screen.
On the surface, the story is the stuff of cheesy after-school specials starring former Mouseketeers: The movie follows Riley as she moves across the country and struggles to cope with a new home, a new school and the stress her parents feel as they adjust to their new lives.
But the genius of Pixar is its understanding that these sorts of mundane domestic trials can be fantastically exciting — if told in the right way. The right way turns out to be from a control room in Riley’s head, where five lively, funny sprites collectively manage the inner workings of her mind.
Each of the sprites is named for a feeling: Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), and Disgust (Mindy Kaling). The sprites don’t just manage their individual emotions, but they also embody them. Joy is joyful, Sadness is sad, and so on. They take turns manning a big console that controls Riley’s reactions, each pushing to make sure their own particular emotion is represented.
In some ways, it resembles a Hollywood writers room, with a staff competing to get ideas used, even while trying to do what is best for the production. It’s a simple metaphor for a complex view of the self as fragmented and internally contradictory, with differing impulses vying for control at any given moment.
In other ways, however, the movie offers a more mechanized view of human nature, with the mind as a labyrinthine Rube Goldberg machine. Beyond the control room, Riley’s mind is a massive complex of gears and gizmos and moving machinery.
As with the conveyor belts in “Toy Story 2” and the suspended dream doors in “Monsters Inc.,” Pixar’s animators prove remarkably adept at rendering the epic clockwork mechanisms of Riley’s inner life: There are memory storage banks, islands of personality that are actually islands, and a train that connects it all (the Train of Thought), as well as a weird and dangerous zone for Abstract Thought and a Hollywood-like production facility, Dream Studios, that stages strange and vivid nightmares.
The bright colors and zany approach to its various zones of thought bring to mind “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” and the neatly metaphorical adventureland is reminiscent of “The Wizard of Oz.”
Indeed, it’s this vast landscape of interconnected mental machinery that provides the setting for the movie’s main adventure, which follows Joy and Sadness attempting to navigate back to a far-off control room even as its foundations begin to crumble. Riley’s cross-country move has left her emotionally fragile. With Joy and Sadness lost in her mental depths, she is ruled entirely by Anger, Disgust and Fear.
The movie’s high-concept construction could easily have come across like little more than a cleverly animated psychology text, but it is grounded in the fundamental emotional appeal of its storytelling, and in the deep sense of compassion and humanity embedded into every neuron of its being.
“Inside Out” takes you inside the mind of its young protagonist, but it’s a movie about a lot more than what it’s like to be an adolescent girl. It’s a richly conceived movie about what it means to be a person, and, in particular, the subtle ways in which the delicate intermingling of joy and sadness form the basis of our personalities and the foundation for our lives.
The movie’s big idea is that we need both, but when I walked out of the theater, all I felt was joy.
TITLE: “Inside Out”
CREDITS: Directed by Pete Docter and Ronaldo Del Carmen; screenplay by Mr. Docter, Josh Cooley and Meg LeFauve
RATING: PG for emotional distress, mild language and frightening imagery
RUNNING TIME: 94 minutes
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