CANON OF FILM: "INSIDE OUT"

INSIDE OUT (2015)

Director: Pete Docter    Co-Director: Ronnie Del Carmen

Screenplay: Pete Docter, Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley based on the original story Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen

 
  

I’m fairly certain that there are far more emotionally complex and fascination characters in the Disney/Pixar library than Riley (Kaitlin Dias), but man does it not feel that way when you’re watching “Inside Out”. Of course, before this film, we rarely ever got so into the mind of a Disney character before. When I participated in Geekcast Radio’s Top 100 Animated Characters poll, I ranked Riley in the Top 20, however, she didn’t make their list overall, but I stand by my thought process on that one. The movie is about Riley and the entire movie, basically takes place, inside of this young eleven-year-old who’s suffering from severe change and discomfort for the first time. It’s strange that those words don’t sound so negative, change especially, but let’s face it, they’re painful, and trying desperately to pretend your real, true emotions, are indeed not your emotions, at any age is a struggle, and it’s probably most important to understand that as a kid and “Inside Out”, well, it visually shows us, kids of all ages, exactly how to do that.

I know, it’s an easy trick and “Inside Out” is by no means the first piece of art to ever take place inside the mind or body of a character. Hell, I think I made more “Herman’s Head” jokes when the film trailers came out then anybody; I don’t even know how many people even remember that show, but how many of those movies or series or other pieces of art,  actually try to examine or even teach the complexities of emotions? I mean, as much as I love “Being John Malkovich” for instance, that movie’s really nothing more than an intellectual mind exercise. “Inside Out” doesn’t just explore the complexity of emotions, it teaches us how to understand them and why they exist. Helps us realize that we can’t simply have Joy (Amy Poehler) without also suffering through Sadness (Phyllis Smith) and also reveals the power of empathy. There’s a scene in the movie that I didn’t remember ‘til now. It’s after Joy and Sadness are stuck in Imagination District, trying to make their way to board the Train of Thought directly to the main station with the other Emotions, and Riley’s old childhood imaginary friend Bingbong (Richard Kind) has lost his rocketship to the Memory Dump. Joy tries to cheer him up but it’s Sadness that ultimately does it, by making him let out his emotions. It’s a subtle scene, but one that is necessary and sets up Joy’s emotional breakdown later and her coming around to understand the importance of why it’s okay to be sad.

And that’s the biggest thing of all. There’s a lot of greatness in this film, but if there’s any singular greatness in “Inside Out” it’s that it shows how it’s okay to be sad. I honestly can’t think of any other film that stirs to teach that. There are movies that definitely make most people, and for that matter, me sad but ones that teach that’s okay; much less a Kid’s movie? And do it this well? I mean, I guess “Sesame Street” and especially “Mister Rogers Neighborhood” at their best had moments where they touched upon that, maybe that one episode of “The Simpsons” where Lisa was sad, but that’s about it in this day and age, and boy that's it's own sad commentary on the state of children's television today.

Sure, there’s a lot of subtler Pixar touches that will fascinate adults like me too, like the particularly inspired casting of Lewis Black as Anger, or the great little jokes about how those facts and opinions all look the same, or how people can forget some crucial and important childhood memories, but somehow that damn bubble commercial jingle just keeps getting stuck in your head, but the reason I keep deciding to torture myself whenever it’s on and keep watching it is because of how it gets to those lessons. It doesn’t shy away from it either; we lose a beloved character and he sacrifices himself to do it. There’s painful realizations that as Riley grows up, she will forget things, and that some things she used to love she will ultimately look upon not-so-fondly. Sure, her real conflict is just that she and her family have moved across country, but it’s usually some sudden simple change even that will ignite the growing up process faster than others. In time, it’s the kind of emotional tug-a-war that most people will inevitably forget later in life; the farther away from the most tragic and painful moments of your life, the less the pain feels, but at the time,….

Director Pete Docter and Co-Director Ronnie Del Carmen originally came up with the idea, and Docter in particular has been around Pixar since "Toy Story", and I think I could argue that he's become their most significant creator. He took over the brand after John Lasseter's exit, and when you look at the stuff most important for him, besides "Inside Out" he's directed "Monsters, Inc.", "Up" and "Soul". All three of those are great and special films in their own right, but it's interesting that, he really went in a direction where he wanted to explore life's most primal emotions. Compare that to Lasseter's most personal films were "Toy Story" and "Cars," or even the short, "Luxo Jr.", it was inanimate objects that he cared about. Part of that is that more plastic-looking objects looked and played better and moved more realistically than humans did in the early days of computer animation but it still was his focus even after they began perfecting that. Docter, always cared more about human connections. "Monsters, Inc." is about monsters, who were taught that humans were somehow toxic, form a connection with a human toddler. "Up" is about looking over one's entire life, as an old man struggles through grief by going on the adventure he promised his wife they go on, even if it's after her passing, and "Soul", is not only about confronting one's death, but also looks at what it means to empathize with others who are struggling with the lives they've got but didn't ask to have. You can pretty easily look through his works and see that he's got a fascination with capturing the emotional struggles of humanity throughout the life cycle. Content-wise, his film feel like they'd fit more next to the filmography of somebody like Richard Linklater than people like Lasseter or Brad Bird, or Andrew Stanton or some of the other great Pixar artists. Other than maybe some of the top Studio Ghibli guys and their storytelling best, what other animation storytellers are so naturally introspective?

Being that they're so connected to human emotions, it's interesting that Docter's films tend to be the most experimental as well. Even though their computer-animated, Pixar tends to not stray too far into the more surreal aspects of animation, but Docter loves diving into it; it's like he was more inspiration by UPA animation instead of traditional hand-drawn Disney or classic Warner Brothers cartoons. The most obvious example in "Inside Out", is the Abstract Thought Shortcut where our main characters go through several levels of animation surrealism before making it out the other end, going through everything from cubism to 2-d dots and lines by the end. It makes sense that his inspirations being the widest range of emotions, depicting that in any form of animations often does require more surreal techniques and narratives. 

That didn't make the filming easy. Going through the process of how "Inside Out" was made is a fascinating one itself. Even before you get to the specifics and extra details of the animation-, Joy alone took about three years to fully create for the screen, not to mention Amy Poehler helping create her dialogue almost to the point that might be able to argue that she should've been a credited writer on the project, but they spent a long time going through child psychologists, neurologists, and other specialists to learn how the emotional centers of the mind work to try to recreate these emotional feelings accurately, not just how they come about but why, and then trying to figure out how to animate that,- you could write full books about every Pixar films and how detailed and elaborate they are to create, but "Inside Out", really went through a lot of work and care, and not only was Lasseter barely involved, but it was the first big project for the company where Steve Jobs wasn't alive to give any of his input towards. There's a lot of threads of input towards it, but this was definitely Pete Docter's baby, and feels like the most personal and touching of all his films so far. It's one I go back to the most, and frankly in general, his name just never comes up among the great animated storytellers. Perhaps because Disney and now Pixar are such behemoth conglomerates in of themselves that we tend to overlook the artists if their names aren't the brand's founders, but take the name Pixar off his projects, and take an auteur view of Docter's work on it's own, and I don't think it's a controversial statement to say that he's already one of the greats.

The guy found a way to make grown adults cry over a cotton candy pink elephant named Bing Bong; if that isn't a master storyteller, I don't know what is.