For Every Laugh, a Tear

Pixar’s Inside Out Is a Brilliant, Emotional Masterpiece

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What was the last movie I watched in such a sustained state of breathless, astonished discovery? I can’t think. Inside Out takes a simple if daring premise — a story about the world inside a child’s mind, with personifications of her emotions as characters — and proceeds to probe, test and explore the implications and limits of this premise with relentless curiosity, invention and insight.

Writer-director Pete Docter’s last film, Up, was Pixar’s most recent genuinely great feature film; it was also the last of a trio of audacious films, along with Ratatouille and especially Wall-E, that stretched the limits of what a Hollywood animated film was allowed to be.

After years of disappointingly conventional fare, Inside Out marks the triumphant return of groundbreaking Pixar. It is a rare family film for so many reasons: one with no villain, for one thing, centering on an imperfect but basically happy intact family going through a tough time. It is a wise and wounding depiction of growing up: a story of growth and loss, with real stakes and real consequences.

It follows Brave as only the second Pixar film with a female protagonist — more than one, in fact, since the story is told with a kind of double vision. It’s the story of 11-year-old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), but also of a quintet of emotions inside her head: above all, Joy (Amy Poehler at her perkiest), next Sadness (deliciously morose Phyllis Smith), then Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling).

In one sense, the movie is most centrally about Riley’s defining relationship with her parents (Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan). But how it is about that relationship turns less on the actual interactions we see between Riley and her parents than on the interactions and experiences of the emotions in her head.

The outward crisis is only the occasion of an upheaval that quite possibly would have occurred in some form anyway. Riley and her family move from the wide-open expanses of Minnesota (where Docter is from) to San Francisco. Riley tries to look on the bright side, though pretty much everything about her experience in the Golden Gate City is a lot less golden than she was hoping.

Riley has always been a naturally sunny kid. Radiant, effervescent Joy is her dominant emotion, setting the tone in “Headquarters” and working hard to ensure that the memories Riley accumulates every day (encapsulated in bowling ball-like orbs) are mostly happy ones. And they are, particularly the defining “core memories” that power Riley’s “islands of personality” — complex structures that include Family, Honesty, Friendship and, um, Hockey and Goofball.

Joy allows that the other emotions have their place — for the most part. Fear, Disgust and Anger all play roles in helping to protect Riley in various ways, though even Joy can’t quite see the point of blue, homely Sadness. She’s such a downer, and both for Riley’s sake and for her parents Joy must stay in the driver’s seat.

And then, well. A tiny meltdown with deceptively shattering consequences rips through Riley’s inner and outer worlds, and Riley is suddenly adrift. Joy is shocked to discover unguessed vulnerabilities in her hard-won accomplishments, and a journey begins through previously unexplored regions of Riley’s mind: long-term memory, imagination, abstract thought and the shadowy realm of the subconscious, with the alarming vast darkness of the memory dump yawning below everything.  

What follows is both Pixar’s most madcap, visually extravagant world-building since Wall-E and an often hilarious visualization of the hidden movements of the unconscious mind. Denizens of Riley’s mental architecture mill about doing various jobs: attending to dimming irrelevant memories, manufacturing dreams from each day’s memories and so forth. There are countless jokes and conceits that will only make sense to owners of brains.

At the same time, a high-stakes race for Riley’s well-being is under way. Riley’s inner landscape is changing in ways her parents scarcely guess, and there are scenes as devastating, particularly for parents, as anything in Finding Nemo or the Toy Story movies.

Riley’s family is not perfect, but they have solid foundations. Dad’s foibles are particularly evident in an unfortunate family dinner, and in a rare glimpse into someone else’s mind we see that Mom has a wistful attachment to a memory of an old boyfriend.

A Pixar film is always a visual feast, but this might be the richest ever, with two contrasting worlds with wholly different looks. The outer world is photorealistic and desaturated; the inner world candy-colored and cartoony. All of Docter’s films (he also wrote and directed Monsters, Inc., as well as Up) have some kind of whimsical, exotic world set alongside the ordinary world, but never before have both worlds, and the relationship between them, been developed to such an extent.

We first meet Riley as a newborn, and the rendering of her perfect little newborn face, with blinking eyes and moist little mouth, is a revelation; she’s the most alive-looking computer-animated character I’ve ever seen.

Joy is a literal bundle of energy, her outline fuzzy with tiny bubbles of light percolating around her and streaming in her wake. The other emotions are also composed of packets of energy. Not only does Anger have a slow-boil surface, the air above his head ripples with heat before his head bursts into flame. Wiry Fear looks like a jangling nerve ending. Disgust vaguely resembles the broccoli she reacts so strongly to.

Inside Out has some of the silliest conceits in any Pixar film, particularly at the climax, but also some of the most haunting melancholy. Riley’s crisis comes to a head in moments of sharp moral clarity and overwhelming emotional power. The scenes around the memory dump, where lovely, once-precious memories pile up, faded, forgotten, crumbling to dust, have a heartbreaking existential force going beyond even the incinerator scene in Toy Story 3.

Pixar has long been guided by Walt Disney’s philosophy that for every laugh there should be a tear. Inside Out is Pixar’s definitive statement on this sensibility, for it is literally about the relationship of Joy and Sadness. Watching it made me think differently about my relationships with my own kids; I have even found myself speaking to them differently. Perhaps the highest praise I can pay the film is that I wish I had seen it as a younger parent.

Steven D. Greydanus is the Register’s film critic.

 

Caveat Spectator: Mild cartoony action; thematic elements, including restrained domestic conflict and a couple of youthful bad decisions. Fine family viewing.