Needless to say, that experience was pretty much all I could think of as the film opened and revealed the control center in which the dominant emotions bicker endlessly in the mind of an 11-year old girl. The film breaks things down further than Cranium Command had the opportunity to in its short run time, and focuses on emotions over parts of the body, choosing to use Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Anger (Lewis Black), and Fear (Bill Hader) as a primary core. It's not surprising to learn that the film is somewhat influenced by that defunct amusement park attraction or that director Pete Docter actually worked on it early in his career with Disney. Inside Out is a hyper-finessed version of the concept that takes the time to develop the complexities of experience and emotion until it arrives at essentially the same conclusion: we function best when the seemingly disparate parts of our body work together. It's a lesson in teamwork and overcoming differences at the chemical level, and that's a big concept for a summer movie, an even bigger one for an animated film geared at kids.
Which is where my inability to forget the Cranium Command experiences of my youth comes in to play: just as walking through the Wonders of Life pavilion dredged up conversations about growing up and "changing" that I didn't want to acknowledge on my visit to an otherwise magical kingdom, I'm dubious of Inside Out's appeal to actual kids. It's safe to say, at this point, that the film plays far better to adults. As we follow our emotion-management team through the childhood traumas of moving, resenting parents, and discovering the bittersweet sensations that accompany nostalgia, the film packs in keen observations on what it means to grow up and how easy it is to feel like the world is crumbling around us. Growing up is, after all, a kind of tragedy, and Pixar wants us to repackage that and make it comfortable, universal, somehow understood. It's a scripted tutorial for getting through Your First Existential Crisis, and a necessary reminder for everyone as they grow up and find it happening again, and again, and again...
I can imagine growing to resent this as a child if only because I can imagine parents and teachers using the characters to speak to fluctuations in my behavior. We need this movie, but I feel the pain of the generation who grows up with parents who assess their melancholy moments in terms of a deadweight, bespectacled Sadness.
Ultimately, Inside Out is a deceptively simple kind of smart and the sort of entertainment that has much practical application as it does anything else. The jokes don't always land, the candy colored visuals often clash with the underlying themes, Joy has way too much screen time, and there's a bit of a disconnect between the film's formal design and the audience it winds up connecting with the most. While I'm a firm believer that Disney/Pixar properties are for all ages, it is strange to find that one of their most conceptually difficult films is also among its least visually sophisticated. There's a flatness to the animation, a blandness to the character design. Part of this, I suppose, is necessary. In the same way, the weirdly tidy, universal aspects of the film are equally necessary. Inside Out isn't interested in telling a truly individual, fully developed, messy story about young Riley, here. They're working to find, instead, an easy to manage terrain that will allow them to explore big ideas in small spaces -- and that's ok. Sometimes being truly inventive in some avenues requires a lack in others, and that's what I see as the cost of Inside Out. Maybe one day they'll make a sequel, a sort of Boyhood as seen from the cranium command center. Maybe one day they'll be so bold as to tackle the same subject using the adult characters (the glimpses we get are problematic, here). Or, you know, maybe they don't. Maybe it's just fine the way it is.
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