Reel recipe for happy holidays
HERE to save the day – and parents’ summer – is Pixar’s Inside Out.
Unlike Jurassic World, it’s not a reworking of an old movie, except bigger and with more teeth. Unlike The SpongeBob Movie, it doesn’t f eel as if i t was designed f or the jaded children of weapons manufacturers. And unlike Minions, it doesn’t make you fall asleep.
Only Pixar could take a metaphor about the emotional struggles of a child fighting depression and turn it into a funny, heart-wrenching adventure. Other critics have raved about how the way a child’s mind works is visualised as five chatty colourful emotions in charge of a theme park.
I especially liked that dreams are presented as a small movie studio with forthcoming attractions including Something’s Chasing Me and I Can Fly. It also makes you reflect that while the multiplexes are j ammed with movies f or children, there are few great films about childhood.
There’s the kestrel-tastic Kes, of course, and French director Francois Truffaut made a classic about child delinquency, The 400 Blows. More recently What Maisie Knew got under the skin of a six-year-old whose parents are divorcing. But mostly the movies are content to show our kids things without being curious about a child’s viewpoint.
One thing that Inside Out absolutely gets right is the pressure put on children to feign cheerfulness and please their parents. It’s up there in the Top Three Things parents want from children: 3) Appear happy; 2) Succeed in life; 1) Shut up and watch the movie, so we can take a nap.