[9.8/10] The best compliment I can give *Inside Out* is that it would still be a great movie if you lopped half of it off. There’s a worthwhile story to be told about an eleven-year-old girl moving halfway across the country and struggling with the adjustment. The emotional beats of Riley feeling like she has to put on a happy face for the good of her parents, buckling under the pressure, and deciding to run away are compelling and poignant on their own.
Likewise, if *Inside Out* were just a romp through the mind of a child, it would still be uproarious and inventive to the last. The movie works just as well as a buddy picture, with Joy and Sadness traipsing around the infinite, colorful labyrinth, leaping over obstacles both literal and metaphorical, and eventually finding common ground. You could take each of these stories, make it the whole movie, and still create something wonderful and stirring.
But the beauty of the film, and one of the things that makes it so special, is the way those two pieces of its story work together in tandem to produce something greater than either could individually. Riley’s struggles mirror Joy’s struggles and vice versa. The obstacles in the real world translate to obstacles in the internal world, and what affects one affects the other. There’s a stunning synergy to the story the film tells, where each element of the movie is made better, more complete, and more unique, by being a piece of the whole.
That is the glory of marrying a tale of a personified emotion straining to keep a positive attitude while trying to retrieve and restore her girl’s core memories while making her way through a dizzying unknown place, with one of a young girl straining to keep a positive attitude while trying to settle in and find a new sense of comfort and belonging while making her way through a dizzying unknown place. One locale is the inner workings of a child’s brain, and the other is San Francisco, but it’s up for debate which is scarier or more bewildering.
Even more impressive is how seamless *Inside Out* is in the effort. There’s never a moment in the movie that feels dull, irrelevant to story or character, or incapable of provoking an emotional response. That response may be delight at the wondrous worlds crafted by co-directors Pete Docter, Ronnie del Carmen, and Pixar’s peerless creative team, melancholy at the film’s many heart-rending moments, or laughter at its brilliant comic routines, but by god, everything in the film works and works together. The movie can jump from Joy’s escapades, to Riley’s first day of school, to the rest of the gang’s antics back at HQ without missing a beat or taking anything away from the picture.
Part of that owes to the brilliant structure and framing of the film, but much of it owes to impeccable casting. Richard Kind nearly steals the show as Bing Bong, Riley’s goofy yet heartfelt imaginary friend, and young Kaitlyn Dias does a stellar job conveying the realness of what poor Riley is going through. If that weren’t enough, I’m not sure there’s ever been a better match between performer and character than for Riley’s emotions. Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Mindy Kalig, and Bill Hader are, literally and figuratively, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear personified.
The film’s humor, whether slapstick, situational, or downright absurd, soars with such ringers on board. Borrowing from the NBC comedy bench also gives the film a chance to inject real character in moments big and small. But Poehler is the star here. As *Parks and Recreation* fans know, she’s capable of turning from bubbly optimism to goofball comedy to heartstring-tugging pathos on a dime. Joy, ironically enough, provides her a vehicle to show her full range, and humanizes the little sprite’s can-do spirit and blind spots. While backed by a flawless ensemble, Poehler anchors the film and does so with literal flying colors.
It’s easy to shine with such a bright and imaginative world to explore. The inside of Riley’s mind provides Pixar’s animators and dream-weavers an opportunity to go wild in visualizing the internal processes of the human brain. Interludes in a zone for abstract thought, an imagination land, a movie studio that makes dreams, and a valley of subconscious nightmares allow the film’s creative to let loose in conjuring up clever, amusing, and eye-catching representations of these functions and show off the studio’s aesthetic abilities without limitation.
It doesn’t just exist for the sake of empty, if stunning, spectacle though. Docter and fellow screenwriters Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley use the half-magical, half-industrial space to both convey the inner workings of Riley’s experiences and to set up the world and rules that Joy and her fellow mind-workers live by that inform both journeys. Details like the actual train of thought, the Memory Dump, the control panel that dictates Riley’s actions, the way her core memories connect with different personality islands, all create setups and payoffs. They matter to Joy’s efforts to escape from memory storage and return to headquarters, and to her eventual epiphany and means to solve both her and Riley’s problems in unison.
That synergy pays off narratively too, as Riley’s rough experiences tear those islands asunder and make it harder for Joy to make it back home, while a control panel operated without Joy or Sadness creates more of those experiences, in a feedback loop that threatens all our heroes. And that solution turns out to be the one thing both Joy and Riley have been trying to avoid, contain, and suppress this entire time -- Sadness.
It’s what got Joy into this mess in the first place. She tried to prevent Sadness from affecting Riley’s core memories, and the pair were sucked up and stranded in the process. The whole journey, Joy tries to hinder her erstwhile partner from interfering, poo poos her suggestions, and treats her as a burden rather than a resource.
And yet, over the course of the journey, she sees the good that Sadness can do, in practical and more metaphorical terms. Bing Bong is stymied and incapable of showing them the way until Sadness acknowledges his hurt and shows him empathy. His tear-earning sacrifice represents loss but also growth through that loss. Joy and Sadness’s favorite memory turns out to be the same, one that had measures of both of them, where Riley lost the big game and felt the shame and difficulty of that, but through those things, received comfort from her parents and a cheering celebration from her friends.
That is the cinch of *Inside Out*. Just as the two halves of the film -- Riley in the real world and Joy in the mental one -- would work well on their own but work spectacularly together, so too do Joy and Sadness go together and create beauty in unexpected ways. Joy realizes that allowing your unhappiness to show rather than bottling it up lets the people who care about you know that you need help, and that, in turn, gets you back to a place of warmth and jubilation. Hurt is not the enemy of happiness; it’s a bridge to help you reach it.
There’s something simple but bold in that acknowledgement, that negative emotions are not meant to be shunned or shuffled off to the side, but embraced and processed as a necessary and vital part of being a fully-formed human. It’s telling that the true looming threat in *Inside Out* isn’t sadness or pain, but rather numbness. These hardships send Riley into a small depression, where her control panel grays out, leaving her incapable of feeling anything or reaching out for the help she needs.
It takes both Joy and Sadness to overcome that, to work in concert to get back to headquarters and give Joy’s blue counterpart the wheel to make Riley feel again. This feeling leads Riley to a confession to her parents of how much she misses her old home and how much she’s struggling in her new one. That, in turn, prompts expressions of sympathy, shared hardship, and ultimately solace from her parents, as they embrace their daughter and give her the comfort and support she needs.
From there, a miracle happens. To this point, all of Riley’s memories have been color-coded according to the emotion that generated them, wholly red or green or otherwise to signify the sentimental shading. But this moment of great hurt followed by greater comfort and acceptance produces one that is swirled yellow and blue, representing the way this new core memory carries both joy and sadness at once and marking a turning point in Riley’s growing maturity and understanding.
Those negative feelings are not meant to be compartmentalized, but rather embraced, to make us more complete and fulfilled human beings. The combination of joy and sadness isn’t bittersweetness. It is, instead, catharsis, the processing of our toughest moments in our acceptance of them, so that our loved ones know we’re hurting, so that we can deal with those complicated emotions that are not black and white, and so that we can experience the rich fullness of life in all its different hues and shades, rather than hobble ourselves in pursuit of happiness alone.
Just as Joy and Riley’s stories are inextricable from one another and make *Inside Out* a better film for their combined hardships and glories, so too do joy and sadness work in concert with one another within ourselves, making us better and more satisfied people. That is the grand, animating inside of this near-perfect film -- a cinematic achievement that mixes so many distinctive visions and imaginative adventures and real life difficulties together -- and finds something beautiful and profound when it brings them together.
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