One of the movie’s best gags is the snoring, red-nosed hulk hidden away in the subconscious. To be lost in its bowels is terrifying even for perky Joy. There is an abyss, naturally, but overall this is a place of little order and great mystery, which you might not expect from Pixar, given its propensity for explaining away say, the sources of scary dreams ( Monsters, Inc.). Riley’s various islands of personality (friends, family, hockey) could be the kind of alien outpost where Han Solo has drinks. The brain itself has components that look like a giant gumball machine. They have to literally climb over the misery to get out. In the Pixar vision of depression, Joy and Riley’s imaginary friend from her earliest years, Bing Bong (Richard Kind) are reduced to tiny pinpoints, bright lights in sea of coal-colored thoughts and memories. Riley plunges into a depression and the movie becomes a race against time as her good memories crumble and misery closes in. Sadness (the wonderful Phyllis Smith, from The Office), blue-skinned and bound up in a tight turtleneck sweater, keeps touching and thus sullying all the old good memories soon, Anger (Lewis Black) moves into the driver’s seat, with Fear (Bill Hader) hovering near by and Disgust (Mindy Kahling) snarking from the other side. No wonder Riley has trouble summoning her joy, especially facing a new school. (Even the perkiest real estate agent would stretch to call this a Victorian, but in the nation’s hottest real estate market, it probably cost at least $1.5 million.) While the movers dawdle and Dad’s “investors” jerk his startup chain, the Andersons live in an empty, narrow, dirty house. These five characters move in and out of control of the central keyboard of Riley’s brain until a crisis is set in motion by the Anderson family’s relocation from Minnesota to San Francisco. Talk about type-casting you wonder if the movie was built around her Parks and Recreation persona). (Usually scientists go with happy when they’re talking about emotions, but Joy makes a better name for anyone voiced by Amy Poehler. Joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust are all depicted as characters that live within Riley.
The central human character is an 11 year-old only child named Riley Anderson (voiced by Kaityn Dias) who loves hockey and her parents, but the story is mainly told from the perspective of five core human emotions. Stylistically Inside Out is nothing like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, but for its scope in examining the maturation process, it might well be called Childhood.
From a story hatched by co-directors Peter Docter ( Up, Monsters, Inc.) and Ronaldo del Carmen, Inside Out is nearly hallucinogenic, entirely beautiful and easily the animation studio’s best release since 2010’s Toy Story 3. Imagine Fellini using animation to create a narrative starring the limbic system, with diversions to the subconscious (“where they take all the troublemakers”), treacherous trips into abstract thinking and rides on the highly erratically scheduled train of thought. That makes it perhaps the craziest movie Pixar has ever come up with.
Now, there’s Inside Out, which defies the conventions of family movies by being an animated comedy about brain chemistry and situational depression. Consider Up (crushed by encroaching development, old man flies away with his house) and WALL-E (environmental wasteland, nice robot). The most profound-as well as profoundly good-Pixar movies are the ones that seem the least plausible as story pitches.
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