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Directors: Pete Doctor, Ronaldo Del Carmen
Writers: Pete Doctor, Josh Cooley, Ronaldo Del Carmen, Meg LeFauve
Voice Cast: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, Richard Kind, Kaitlyn Dias.
Inside Out is the fifteenth feature film by Pixar Animation Studios, following the story of a young girl trying to adjust to moving to a new town, and how her emotions, five little people in her mind, try and guide her through this difficult time. This is made that much harder by head emotion Joy and outcast emotion Sadness getting sucked out of the mind's control center. It's a sort of blend of a rarely used concept (people controlling your head) and a familiar one (the journey to a goal) to creative a fairly unique plot that always has something interesting going on.
It probably goes without saying that the movie is absolutely gorgeous, with the more realistic looking and toned real world environment contrasting with the creativity filled, brightly colored mental world. The characters are all likable, having sympathetic motives to keep the audience with them even when they screw up, and there seems to be a concentrated effort put into making the emotion characters have actually personalities with traits other than their given emotions. There are a lot of good jokes sprinkled throughout, including a number of ones based on "explaining" why certain things happen in your head.
Among all the movie's many well handled aspects, probably the most notable thing is the emotion, which is probably a byproduct of the subject matter. The movie uses its setting and plot to explore why sadness is a useful and important emotion, and teach that being happy all the time just can't be done and is impractical anyway, both rather atypical lessons, at least for PG movies. With those types of plot elements, sad moments are inevitable, and the movie handles them fantastically. It really wants to make you cry, with its attempts ranging from small, melancholy bits to huge, heartbreaking scenes, and since it's all handled with the expertise and quality of people who definitely know what they're doing by this point, it's very likely it will succeed in its goal at least once.
With so much of the movie being very well handled the only real problem is that the movie isn't quite long enough for all of it. There's a lot of stuff the movie wants to do and a lot of stuff it wants to show us and at points it really feels like it's rushing to fit everything in. Interesting locations just dropping from the film after only getting a few minutes of screen time happens on more than one occasion, and there are a few times where things have a lot less impact than they should because they haven't been given the time to build and setup properly. An extra ten or fifteen minutes or so to stretch everything out probably would have done wonders to make things feel more smooth.
Inside Out could stand to be a little less cluttered, but it's still a very well put together and entertaining movie, both when it's making you smile and when it's making you cry.
Inside Out
Directors: Pete Doctor, Ronaldo Del Carmen
Writers: Pete Doctor, Josh Cooley, Ronaldo Del Carmen, Meg LeFauve
Voice Cast: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, Richard Kind, Kaitlyn Dias.
Inside Out is the fifteenth feature film by Pixar Animation Studios, following the story of a young girl trying to adjust to moving to a new town, and how her emotions, five little people in her mind, try and guide her through this difficult time. This is made that much harder by head emotion Joy and outcast emotion Sadness getting sucked out of the mind's control center. It's a sort of blend of a rarely used concept (people controlling your head) and a familiar one (the journey to a goal) to creative a fairly unique plot that always has something interesting going on.
It probably goes without saying that the movie is absolutely gorgeous, with the more realistic looking and toned real world environment contrasting with the creativity filled, brightly colored mental world. The characters are all likable, having sympathetic motives to keep the audience with them even when they screw up, and there seems to be a concentrated effort put into making the emotion characters have actually personalities with traits other than their given emotions. There are a lot of good jokes sprinkled throughout, including a number of ones based on "explaining" why certain things happen in your head.
Among all the movie's many well handled aspects, probably the most notable thing is the emotion, which is probably a byproduct of the subject matter. The movie uses its setting and plot to explore why sadness is a useful and important emotion, and teach that being happy all the time just can't be done and is impractical anyway, both rather atypical lessons, at least for PG movies. With those types of plot elements, sad moments are inevitable, and the movie handles them fantastically. It really wants to make you cry, with its attempts ranging from small, melancholy bits to huge, heartbreaking scenes, and since it's all handled with the expertise and quality of people who definitely know what they're doing by this point, it's very likely it will succeed in its goal at least once.
With so much of the movie being very well handled the only real problem is that the movie isn't quite long enough for all of it. There's a lot of stuff the movie wants to do and a lot of stuff it wants to show us and at points it really feels like it's rushing to fit everything in. Interesting locations just dropping from the film after only getting a few minutes of screen time happens on more than one occasion, and there are a few times where things have a lot less impact than they should because they haven't been given the time to build and setup properly. An extra ten or fifteen minutes or so to stretch everything out probably would have done wonders to make things feel more smooth.
Inside Out could stand to be a little less cluttered, but it's still a very well put together and entertaining movie, both when it's making you smile and when it's making you cry.