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scrawnydutchman · 6 years

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‘Inside Out’ Movie Review

*NOTE: The following review contains major spoilers, highlighted in bold letters for readers convenience. If you haven’t seen the film yet, skip past the bold letter segments and come back to read them once you HAVE seen the film for my full thoughts.*

Now I know what you’re thinking. Why in the hell am I putting up a review for a film that’s close to three years old now? Well, here’s a little context. Those of you internet surfers may have seen this little meme float around the web recently:

Everybody has their own opinions on this and there’s good reason why it’s trending. It’s a legitimately fun discussion to hear about everyone’s favorite movies from the “happiest” company on earth. For anybody curious on what I think, HERE’S the version of the meme I created:

*the distinct lack of any and all Emperor’s New Groove and/or Hunchback of Notre Dame is a crime against cinema*

You’ll notice how Finding Nemo beat Inside Out in the first round, and next to the bracket for Inside Out I wrote “never saw it: may change later”. Well, after family and friends highly recommended I sit down and see it, I’m here to tell you that now that I’ve seen Inside Out . My opinion . . . has not changed. Finding Nemo beats it. Easily in fact. Let me explain why, starting with Story.

Story:

Synopsis: Inside the minds of every human being resides five emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust. These emotions have a duty to protect their human from danger and guide them through life. We follow the inner workings of a little girl named Riley’s psyche in which Joy has taken the leadership role to make sure every day of Riley’s life is a good one. She maintains Riley’s optimism and makes sure nothing gets in the way of her happy life by keeping Sadness on a leash. Things change though when a challenging time in Riley’s life occurs; she and her family move to San Francisco. Joy struggles to keep Riley’s optimism up and inevitably she and sadness get removed from headquarters, leaving the rest of the gang to try and do Joy’s job while she’s away (and failing at it). Can Joy and Sadness get back to headquarters in time to save Riley and make sure she can be happy again?

This movie is infinitely praised for being one of Pixar’s most creative and original films,and to be fair it’s not hard to see why. It’s a very outside the box idea that’s rarely been explored before and this movie explores it in a way only Pixar can come up with. It also has a lot of fun with demonstrating real life psychological concepts in a way that feels very fresh.

It also has a moral lesson that’s both original for a kids film and absolutely necessary for children to learn. Accepting that sadness and other negative emotions are not only a part of life but an ESSENTIAL part of life is a pill most people, even adults, have trouble swallowing. Of COURSE everyone wants to feel happy all the time, but it’s unhealthy to bottle up feelings that are a necessity to dealing with life’s special challenges.

Also . . . the climax of this film IS very emotional. Not Coco levels of emotional, but still sad in a way that got me to tear up a bit.

That said, it isn’t ALWAYS effective in how it expresses it’s ideas. While the visuals of this film are excellent (which we’ll get into in a bit) this film often runs into a bit too much of a ‘tell, don’t show’ attitude. A lot of concepts introduced in this film are verbally explained by one of the characters when they could have just as easily been presented clearly enough with visual context clues. I get that it’s a kids movie and kids may not be as skilled in picking up nuances, and to be fair this movie DOES explore a lot of concepts a child may not be immediately keen on, but film is meant to be a visual medium in which ideas and concepts are made understandable by what the audience sees rather than what they’re being told verbally. It especially makes it a problem for how characters are portrayed because one in particular feels like she exists solely as an exposition dump for three quarters of the run time. We should probably talk about characters for a second.

Characters:

So not gonna lie, this is by far the weakest area of the movie. How can I be such a heartless monster to say such a thing? Well, the best way to explain it is to compare it to Finding Nemo, the whole reason I even saw the movie to begin with. Coincidentally enough, these two movies actually have a lot in common. They’re both “buddy road trip” movies where two characters go on a big scope adventure, come across wacky colourful characters on their path and ultimately learn a lesson not often addressed in kids films. The difference is, Finding Nemo does more to establish character motivation AND it takes more time to establish multiple character arcs, ironically within the same runtime as Inside Out more or less. Marlin’s motivation for being a strict and neurotic parent is immediately shown, NOT told, in the opening. Same thing with Nemo’s tendency to rebel. Both characters are given arcs in which they each learn a unique lesson. Marlin learns to take more risks to accomplish goals and Nemo learns to be self reliant when separated from his dad. Plus along the way they come across TONS of memorable side characters. Dory, The Sharks, the school of fish, the seagulls, the pet fish in the fish tank. It does more to establish an infinitely more appealing cast of characters.

Inside Out is focused on Joy . . .TOO focused on Joy. She’s the only character with a truly fleshed out story arc. She’s the first character we see in the film and we’re verbally told through her perspective on why things are the way they are. She’s the only one of the five emotions who really learns anything and really changes.

The only other character in the story with an arc is Bing Bong the imaginary friend, who appears pretty late in the film and effectively dies soon too. His arc is wrapped up pretty hastily.

Every other character in this film is a means to an end. Fear, Disgust and Anger all exist to get a major story beat going. That’s it. Their banter between each other is likable at first but is pretty wash rinse repeat. Her parents only get one entertaining scene in the film that express any kind of personality and then the rest of the time they serve the same functions as each other (seeing if Riley is okay but ultimately not doing anything about it). Sadness is the biggest offender of not serving much beyond being a means to an end because despite having the most screentime after Joy she mainly serves as exposition dumping. Every time Joy isn’t sure about how the brain works (if she doesn’t know where things are or what they are why is she in charge?) Sadness just verbally explains it to the audience. “Oh, that’s long term memory. Oh, that’s abstract thought. Here’s what we should do about it.” She also propels the plot forward in a pretty lackluster way. The reason conflict even happens is because Sadness is compelled to taint memories (for reasons they never really explain). Riley isn’t even a character, really. She’s just an outward demonstration of the ramifications of the real conflict.

And I’m just gonna come out and say it . . . .Joy is too difficult to like for a good chunk of this movie. The movie shows her as very controlling and bossy and selfish. It immediately made me sour towards her. I know, I know, the idea is that everyone wants to feel Happy more than anything else and she DOES learn the error of her ways in the end, but they could have done a little more to make her actions sympathetic than just immediately show her hog the controls once Sadness shows up. It’s weird that Joy rubs me the wrong way more than Disgust does, a character specifically designed to be bitchy. To compare to Finding Nemo again, we understand that Marlin’s actions aren’t right in the beginning, but we know WHY he does it. It’s not for any malicious intent either. He only wants to protect his son because he learned the hard way how fragile life is and he feels like he failed to protect his family before. Joy just gets needy as soon as another character shows up and seemingly for no other reason than she just wants to have the final word in what happens. Maybe they could have made her more sympathetic by showing Riley get into a hard to cope with situation like her dad being really mad and yelling at her for something she did and Joy feeling like she owes it to Riley to make sure she never feels that bad again. That way it’s at least for somebody else’s sake besides her own. This is admittedly a hard problem to articulate because you could argue everything the emotions do, they do for Riley’s sake, but while all the other emotions clearly act with Riley’s best interests in mind Joy is shown to do what she does more out of competitiveness than duty.

Acting:

Every cast member of this flick does a great job. Amy Poehler makes a strong performance as Joy, really communicating the oozing enthusiasm and the struggle to maintain a positive attitude. Bill Hader does a great job as Fear and has some of the more effective deadpan line delivery in the film. Lewis Black makes an effectively funny Anger who makes great comedic foil for pretty well every other character he interacts with. Mindy Kaling arguably does the best job as Disgust. I say that because making a character designed to be unlikable like this (the typical girl bully “shallow bitch” archetype) endearing and not annoying has to be no easy task. Phyllis Smith does an okay job as Sadness. She’s especially funny when she has to say something sarcastic. Richard Kind plays Bing Bong and does a great job as sort of a washed up but charming imaginary friend. The rest of the cast is passable but not remarkable.

Visuals (Animation & Design):

As anyone would expect from Pixar, Inside Out is yet another visual marvel. This movies greatest strength is it’s use of colour. More specifically, colour contrast. The shear opposition between the bright saturated colors of the mind and it’s deep, unsaturated grays and blacks of the sadder scenes is excellent. There are some shots in this film that are poster material simply because the contrast adds SO MUCH to the overall composition of the frame. It makes your eye all the more drawn to the colours that really pop when they’re set against gloomy atmospheres.

One shot in particular that stands out is an extreme wide shot of Joy crying in the abyss, with her glow piercing the darkness and another memory fading away in peripheral vision.

The animation is great too. I like how while the human characters move rigidly and in accordance to real world physics, the emotions go to a cartoony extent with their dynamic poses, snappy energy and great use of line of action. The designs really showcase the best of their over the top acting, ESPECIALLY fear. the lanky, noodly armed guy has some of the most effective slapstick because of how fast and how far he stretches his limbs. In fact, all the designs of the emotions are great. As is always a necessity in character design 101, you can put them in silhouette and still be able to tell which is which.

Of course, a standout moment in the film when it comes to animation is the “abstract thought” scene. Borrowing a page from the book of Picasso, the designs in this scene are wonderfully out there and I love how it addresses such a meta idea for a kids movie. This is the one moment of the film where i think verbal explanation from Sadness is necessary.

The textures on the emotions are a nice touch too. I wouldn’t have guessed that the fuzzy, almost plush like look would have been an effective choice on characters meant to represent concepts as metaphysical as the emotional spectrum, but it’s genuinely a sight for sore eyes. I’ll admit SOME of the textures of specific location pieces seem a bit . . .dated and unpolished, but to be perfectly honest I saw this after I saw Coco so chances are the unbelievable textures of that are just spoiling me. I won’t hold it against the overall score.

Sound design (Music & Sound Foley)

As I’ve said in past reviews, this is a hard area to talk about, mainly because the film handles the sound design about as well as any other big budget film. I don’t remember anything music wise aside from one scene where I swear to God they just took the melody of Plug-In Baby by Muse.

There’s also the scene of the movie where they’re trying to break Bing Bong out of a balloon cage while not waking up a nightmare clown. The balloon sound effects are REEEEEALLY loud; easily the most blasted up sound foley out of everything in this movie. I guess it’s effective as the point of the scene is they’re trying not to wake the clown guy up but even so I think they could have made that point without making the loudness of it outweigh any other sound THAT much.

Conclusion:

Overall, this is a serviceable Pixar film. Where does it rank as far as Pixar films go? Well, probably lower within the Top 10 if I’m honest (The best Pixar films are The Incredibles, Coco, Wall-E, Ratatouille, Toy Story, Finding Nemo and Up, not necessarily in that order). It’s DEFINITELY not better than Finding Nemo. Finding Nemo does a lot of what Inside Out accomplishes except better with a more memorable cast, more relatable main characters, more fleshed out character arcs and less on-the-nose portrayal of it’s ideas. Inside Out has greatly effective animation & design as well as a healthy set of clever ideas, but I’d say it’s weak amount of character is what drags it down. It’s definitely worth checking out at least once, but it’s effect isn’t enough to shake the decisions of my Disney bracket. You now have permission to rant to me about how wrong I am.

Score:

Story - 1/2 - Average

Characters: - .5/2 - Below Average

Acting: 1.5/2 - Above Average

Visuals: 2/2 - Excellent

Sound Design: 1/2 - Average

6 out of 10. An okay movie, but ultimately disappointing.

#disney #animation #film review #pixar #inside out #movie review #disneybracket #disney&pixarbracket #Disnerd

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