The film follows the different personified emotions of an eleven-year-old girl named Riley as they operate the controls inside her head. The emotion that's in charge most of the time is Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), but she also has Anger (voiced by Louis Black), Fear (voiced by Bill Hader), and Disgust (voiced by Mindy Kaling) help to, in Joy's words, "keep Riley safe." Sadness (voiced by Phyllis Smith), is also there, but Joy can't figure out how to use her and mostly tries to keep Sadness from messing things up. On the outside, Riley and her parents are moving from Minnesota to San Francisco, which causes some internal problems for her emotions to deal with.
The internal world within Riley's head is very creative. Memories are represented as orbs, each one color-coded to match up with the emotion that was in charge at the time the memory was formed: yellow for joy, blue for sadness, red for anger, purple for fear, and green for disgust. While Riley sleeps, the memories from that day are transferred to long term storage. Additionally, "core memories" are the basis for Riley's personality, with traits including hockey, honesty, and family.
The character designs are very imaginative. Not only does each emotion have an appropriate personality to match their name (Anger is a hothead, Disgust is hyper-judgmental, etc.), but they also look like their not quite solid. Each emotion is made up of a collection of dots that are pressed together into a humanoid shape. This design scheme reminded me of light particles or neural impulses, so good job design team.
And good job to the research team. As we learn more and more about the world of Riley's brain, there are lots of references to different aspects of psychology and how humans process thoughts and emotions: the subconscious, lost memories, REM sleep, abstract thinking, etc. None of it feels forced and everything comes across very creatively in a completely natural way. One aspect of that is the five emotions that operate Riley's brain. Something that my dad pointed out to me is that there are only five facial expressions that are recognized by all humans regardless of culture and they're the five emotions represented in the film
The story's theme of all emotions being important and having their place was pretty obvious from the get-go, but despite seeing where the movie would be going the whole time, the filmmakers still got to me: at the film's climax, I cried. I'm not one to cry in movies -- I often laugh at the parts that are supposed to make me cry because I think it's funny that the film crew is trying to so obviously manipulate me. And yet, everything in this movie was done so well that I teared up at exactly the place I was supposed to. Congratulations, (director) Pete Doctor, you have done what few others have.
My only complaint about the film is that Joy, who is yellow, has blue hair. All of the other characters have hair the same color as the rest of them (except Anger, who's bald), so why not Joy? This is literally my only negative thing to say about the movie.
To answer the question I asked at the beginning, if Inside Out is the new status quo, than old form Pixar is back. If you haven't seen this movie, I cannot recommend it enough. It's great for kids, but even better for grown-ups.
Inside Out is distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
3 comments:
Thanks for the review. Now I'm even more curious to see the movie.
We saw it on Saturday and loved it as well! Bryan and I were both pretty emotional at the end. Well, I was emotional several times throughout, but there was one scene that hit both of us pretty hard. And her hair was the only thing that bothered me too.
I think that they didn't want to give the emotions hair that was a shade of a "natural" color. Hence red is bald, and yellow got blue hair. Purple's hair does come across as black, but I think they really wanted to avoid "blond" hair. If Joy had yellow hair, then it might give the feeling of "blonds have more fun." Dumb? Yes. But that's what I guessed about Joy's hair color so it wouldn't bother me.
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