Inside Out (Pete Docter, Ronnie Del Carmen, 2015)
Imdb
Date Watched: 03/22/16
Cinema or Home: Work, on my portable DVD player
Reason For Watching: I have a lot of down time at work this week because the boss is out of town, so I needed something to pass the time.
Rewatch: Yes
Possible Spoilers Ahead
The idea of people's minds being controlled by a bunch of characters inside their heads is not new and after the turd that was
Brave, I was a bit skeptical of the quality of this film at first. I also didn't exactly love it when I saw it in the theater, though I did like it.
I think this was my third or fourth viewing of the film and my appreciation for it has grown each time. While the premise isn't truly new, the filmmakers really flexed their creative muscles with the way that it was presented. We the viewers are taken on an adventure through the part of the mind where memories are stored and where imagination happens.
I really liked the way that this was explored. We get to see a little girl's emotions develop from infancy to adolescence and they control everything she does from a console inside her head. Granted, she only develops five emotions - Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust - but more than that would probably just be confusing for young viewers.
I think my favorite scenes were abstract thought, dream productions, and a certain interaction between Joy and an imaginary friend in the memory dump. There are little things too that really made me smile, like when a container of facts and one of opinions are spilled and get mixed up and are just tossed back in without being sorted (because “Who can tell the difference anyway?”), the gum commercial that gets randomly played inside the girl’s mind, and the place where the deepest fears are kept – inhabited by a giant clown who lives in dark forest of…
broccoli. We also get brief (and hilarious) glimpses of the emotions inside the minds of other characters and there's a great little montage of this during the end credits that shouldn't be missed.
As with most family films there are lessons to be learned here. We learn that it’s okay to feel a full range of emotions. We also learn about valuing other people’s input when working as a group and that being a group leader doesn’t mean you’re always right.
Incidentally, Sadness is my favorite emotion - though Funny Face says that if I were to be a character from the film, it would have to be some sort of combination of Anger and Disgust. She is most definitely Joy.
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