Inside Out review – an emotional

rollercoaster
Reviewed By Jonathan Romney

The new Pixar animation Inside Out could easily have been called Out There. It’s as
bizarre, imaginative and authentically psychedelic as anything produced in mainstream
animation. At this point in the fortunes of the once-infallible creative powerhouse, you
wouldn’t have bet on Pixar coming up with anything very outré. Bought by Disney in
2006, the studio hadn’t produced anything truly inspired that wasn’t a sequel since Up
in 2009. Given the humdrum quality of Cars 2 and Monsters University and 2012’s well-
intentioned but forgettable Brave, it seemed as if the studio had lost its penchant for
exotic risk.

But Inside Out is in the top rank of Pixar productions with its combination of audacity,
intelligence, wit and emotional reward. Directed and co-written by Pete Docter
(Monsters, Inc and Up) and co-directed by Ronnie del Carmen, Inside Out starts from a
boldly abstract premise: the narrative plays out within the psyche of a girl named Riley
(voiced by Kaitlyn Dias) and the film’s characters are her feelings.

At the start, one of those feelings, Joy (Amy Poehler), asks: “Do you ever look at
someone and wonder what is going on inside their head?” The next questions that arise
are: what might such psychic events actually look like? And how might they generate a
story that can be sustained for 102 minutes? Inside Out meets these challenges with an
inventiveness that’s appropriately mind-boggling. Formidably ingenious, Inside Out hits
an elusive sweet spot in appealing to children and adults alike

The film starts in a dark cavern, the Plato’s cave of the unformed self. As baby Riley is
born, Joy spontaneously appears – a shimmering, big-eyed Tinkerbell-like pixie – and
observes Riley’s view of the world on a glowing, cloud-like surveillance screen. Joy is
soon joined by other emotions – Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger, the latter
characterised as a squat red sponge that bursts into flame when provoked. These five
monitor Riley’s life and produce her responses by operating a console of levers and
buttons, something between the USS Enterprise and PlayStation 4. Inside Out explores
much the same premise – little people busy working in your head – as the Beano’s
Numskulls strip, but it’s infinitely more sophisticated and distinctively female-skewed.
The film’s real heroine is Joy, a pathologically upbeat micro-manager convinced that
only positive feelings count – and Amy Poehler instils Joy with something of the
obsessive girl guide eagerness of her Leslie Knope in the TV sitcom

Then crisis comes as Riley, now 11, moves with her parents (Diane Lane, Kyle
MacLachlan) from Minnesota to scary San Francisco, where a new school fills her with
anguish and where, worst of all, pizzas come topped with broccoli. The ensuing
narrative is set in the far reaches of Riley’s psychic landscape – and it is a landscape. Her
trauma triggers the seismic collapse of the “personality islands” – literally, floating
landmasses – that define who she is, devoted to such themes as family, friendship and
hockey.

A control-room malfunction leaves Joy and Sadness wandering in a vast allegorical

geography that includes such landmarks as imagination (a theme park) and the place
where dreams are made: a movie studio, of course, where productions range from I’m
Falling Down a Very Deep Pit to Fairy Dream Adventure Part 7. In the film’s wildest
moment, the wanderers enter a zone of abstract thought, where they are zapped into a
series of increasingly simplified geometric shapes, as they – and the film itself –
dizzyingly self-deconstruct (“Oh no, we’re non-figurative!”).

Formidably ingenious, Inside Out hits an elusive sweet spot in terms of appealing to
children and adults alike. It makes extraordinary use of knowing cuteness, for example.
Take Bing Bong, Riley’s long-lost imaginary friend from early childhood, a cat-elephant
hybrid made out of candyfloss. Here, the film seems to stray perilously into Jar Jar Binks
territory – but while smaller children will warm to Bing Bong as a cuddly oddity, adults
and older kids will see something quite troubling in a figure that’s manifestly a primitive
creation of the infant mind, poignantly fated to extinction.

It’s in the way that the story depicts the fading of childhood’s mental furniture, and
explores the mechanics of forgetting, that Inside Out achieves a universal significance.
While specialists may bemoan the simplicity of the film’s mental model, inspired by the
“psychoevolutionary” theory of Robert Plutchik, the eventual message – that sorrow is
as valuable an emotion as happiness – is delivered with less piety than you might
imagine.

As for the visual style, it’s dazzling, flouting CGI’s tendency to photorealism in favour of
overt cartoonishness in a 1950s retro vein, together with a refined exploration of light:
the emotions are composed of fibrous bundles of luminescence. The running gags are
delicious (don’t miss the end credits), and in the best Pixar fashion, Inside Out expertly
but uncynically tugs the heartstrings – and indeed, the film’s theme overtly shows you
how it’s done. Don’t be afraid to come out of Inside Out wiping a tear from your eye: you
can always say: “It was the little people in my head that did it.”