Review: Inside Out

by Trevor Kirkendall

★★★★

“Inside Out” shows Pixar in a triumphant return to form. It’s one of the most original and innovative stories to ever come out of the studio, and it couldn’t come a better time. Pixar has had a long history of issuing original content to the cinemas, but after two mediocre sequels there were some questioning if they had lost some of their creative power. Those doubts seem to have been resolved, at least for now, because “Inside Out” could very well be the best film Pixar has ever done.

The concept revolves around those tiny little voices in your head. The film personifies five of the basic human emotions: Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness (voiced by Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, and Phyllis Smith respectively, making this one of the greatest voice casts ever assembled for an animated feature). Each emotion is responsible for bringing out that specific emotion from Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), the 11-year-old girl whose mind they inhabit.

Just like in all of Pixar’s films, all is right with the world until it isn’t. In this case, Riley and her parents move from their Midwestern home to San Francisco. This causes all the memories Riley has to be affected by Sadness, something Joy doesn’t want to see happen. But an accident within the emotions’ headquarters sends Joy and Sadness into the far away regions of Riley’s long-term memory storage leaving them unable to control her emotions. That leaves Fear, Anger, and Disgust to lead the way. With everything falling apart, Joy and Sadness have to race back to headquarters before Riley’s entire personality is altered.

This is a genius premise for a film, and the first logline released by Disney several years ago made it immediately intriguing. Not often do the promises of great ideas turn into great films. Pixar has really made themselves synonymous with quality filmmaking over the years despite a couple missteps along the way. They’ve really outdone themselves with “Inside Out.” It may very well go down as their best film. We’ll need to marinade on that one for a while before handing it that title, but it makes a very strong case.

For my money, Pixar’s finest film is “Up” which was directed by the great Pete Docter who also lends his leadership to “Inside Out.” It’s no wonder both of these films are among the studio’s best. Docter knows how to pull the best emotions out of his scripts as evident by full-grown adults weeping during the opening 10-minutes of “Up.” But here, he literally pulls emotions out of this script and makes them into classic Pixar characters (including the best Pixar character ever: Riley’s imaginary friend Bing Bong voiced by the incomparable Richard Kind). He brings them to life thanks to Pixar’s innate ability to make computer-drawn designs into life-like creations, but mostly because the screenplay is so well written that we’re able to immediately identify with them.

And this is where Docter is able to dig into the most creative corners of his own mind. This isn’t the first movie where Pixar has breathed life into inanimate objects, but it is the first time they’ve had to create characters – and an entire world, for that matter – out of something that does not exist at all. This is something we as filmgoers aren’t privileged to these days: the ability to be taken somewhere you’ve never seen before.

The level of detail in the animation is nothing new for Pixar and shouldn’t come to the surprise of anyone who has seen their movies in the past. Yet, they continue to improve their style with each new film. The film is edited together as if it were a live action film, which brings out a more film-like quality rather than that of a goofy cartoon. Combine that with the need to create an entire world from scratch makes this film much more unique than the studio’s previous efforts. Not just unique from its creative design and animation, but also from the story side since this world has its own set of rules it follows that we must learn. We’re not given to a huge opening sequence of exposition about the rules, but instead pick them up as we go along which makes the film enormously fun.

Without any emotional involvement within the story, “Inside Out” would have still be an enjoyable movie, but Docter didn’t want that to be the case. Apparently, he wanted tug at your heartstrings as hard as he possibly could until you left teardrops on the cinema floor. It’s shouldn’t be a surprise that a movie with emotions would be somewhat emotionally charged, but “Inside Out” is an astoundingly emotional film with a few very powerful sequences.

“Inside Out” is a massive success about the realities of getting older and working through life’s problems. It’s a stunning return to form for Pixar in all departments: story, animation, voices, and most importantly its ability to make you feel something other than just causal entertainment. It’s a film made with much more soul and passion than almost anything else we’ve seen so far this year. This will end up being one of the best films of 2015 without question.