Inside Out
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN ONCE announced a film “set within the architecture of the mind”; Pete Docter could have described his extraordinary Inside Out in similar terms, and delivers more literally on the promise. A story focused on the competing emotions inside an 11-year-old girl’s head as she faces the greatest challenge of her young life, this is a metaphor extended to feature length and somehow, magically, able to sustain itself.
It came, as so many of the best films do, from a personal conundrum. Docter started wondering what was going on inside his young daughter’s head as she approached adolescence and her personality shifted in ways he didn’t quite understand. Being an animation genius, what could have been an idle musing became the engine for a years-long storytelling odyssey. How do you conceptualise the workings of a human mind on the brink of adulthood? How can you possibly encapsulate one human being’s inner life, for even a couple of days? It turns out that, with trial and error and vast effort, the Pixar team found a way.
So we are introduced to the five emotions inside the head of young Riley (Kaitlyn Dias). There’s Amy Poehler’s Joy, manically trying to keep Riley happy at all times; Phyllis Smith’s Sadness, apparently intent on bringing everyone down; Bill Hader’s hysterical Fear; Mindy Kaling’s contemptuous Disgust; and Lewis Black’s explosive Anger. Riley is moving, with her family, across the US to San Francisco, leaving her friends and spacious suburban life behind. When Joy, trying to hold Sadness back at this change, loses the ‘core’ memories that make Riley who she is, Joy and Sadness must go on an odyssey through Riley’s mind to return to their place in her ‘headquarters’ with the lost treasures — and bring Riley back to herself.
It’s a parade of huge concepts that the film must explain in relatively short order. But Docter’s most dizzying achievement is that he actually made two films that play out at exactly the same time, on the same screen. Kids get to watch a typical Pixar buddy comedy, with a colourful pair on a madcap adventure through a magical landscape. It’s a comedy that may give them some new concepts to help explain their own feelings among all the squashy, stretchy characters and wild, Powell-and-pressburgermeets-dalí landscapes, but it’s recognisable as family entertainment. There is running and jumping and flying; squabbling characters and a unicorn with a rainbow mane. It’s charming, and exciting.
Adults, meanwhile, are watching a scientifically informed discussion of how our consciousness works and seeing a mind grow from childhood to adolescence, facing
disorienting emotional shifts and grappling with serious mental danger along the way. There’s real meat to the interplay of the characters, and a rigour in the illustration of these abstract ideas; Docter, co-director Ronnie del Carmen and the team worked with psychologists and neuroscientists to create something that was not just fun but also useful as we try to understand ourselves.
For example, at one point with both Joy and Sadness gone and Riley’s other Emotions squabbling uselessly, Riley’s ‘control panel’ shuts down entirely. This, it’s clear to adult watchers, is depression setting in: not feeling sad, but the inability to feel anything at all. It’s only when Sadness helps Riley channel her frustration and upset that it’s possible for her to function again. That’s an extraordinary concept to explain visually in a movie aimed at kids.
No wonder it took years, and a huge amount of trial and error, to get there. Docter and his team had to work out which Emotions should dominate and how Joy and her team might look (Disgust was, apparently, the hardest to figure out). A team of imaginary friends were boiled down to one, lingering infant dream: Richard Kind’s pure and lovely Bing Bong. They toyed with different ways of showing the Emotions’ effect on Riley: at one point, Joy manifested in the real world; at another, early concept art also showed a harp that cried tears when Riley was sad. They eventually settled on a Star Trek-style control panel, all lights and joysticks (pun almost certainly intended). The Mind-scape went from a sort of magical mountain to a bright white space, surrounded by pink clouds and possibility stretching into infinity: a contrast to the desaturated colours and rough edges of the ‘real’ world where Riley is struggling.
As you’d expect, many familiar Pixar preoccupations shine through. Joy and Sadness have the studio’s classic odd couple-in-theworkplace dynamic, with the unstoppable force of Joy’s manic determination meeting Sadness’ immovable weariness. Both voice actors channel characters they perfected on TV: Poehler’s endlessly upbeat Leslie Knope from Parks And Recreation and Smith’s low-impact saleswoman from The Office.
Like the art-history credits of WALLLE and the Married Life montage of Up, there is a show-offy animated sequence for Pixar afficionados. Joy, Sadness and Bing Bong take a shortcut through “conceptual thought”, and become abstract shapes and finally single lines before escaping back into the ‘reality’ of the rest of the mind. The most unfailing Pixar trademark is there too: the outrageous tear-jerking. Here, Bing Bong sacrifices himself for Riley’s happiness, a last act of selfless love from a creature who only ever existed to make a child happy. But noting that filmmakers are once again doing what they do well is no criticism, and the sophistication of this film puts it apart from most of the studio’s output; only Soul (co-directed by Docter) in recent years has come close to this level of ambition.
Ultimately, Joy learns that no-one can be truly happy all of the time; sometimes you need to feel down because that is the right response to a tough world. When she hands over the reins willingly to Sadness, Riley’s world opens up. Her capacity for emotion and connection increase, and her Emotions reconfigure with her. It’s a grown-up sort of conclusion to, literally and figuratively, one of the brainiest movies ever made; a case where sharing is not just caring but the only way to truly transform your world — and if that weren’t enough, it has a funny bit with a cat.