Inside Out [PG]

Riley is your average loveable girl who loves her family, hockey, is honest, and a bit of a goofball. The people that make Riley who she is are the four little people who live in her mind: Joy who makes Riley the happy girl she is, Fear who keeps her safe, Disgust who brings just a little sass to her personality, Anger who doesn’t let her bottle things up, and Sadness who… well no-one really knows what Sadness does. Together they make Riley, Riley. But that changes one day when Riley and her family move away from Minnesota and some of Riley’s core memories get changed. Joy and Sadness end up stranded in her long-term memory. Without Joy in command Disgust, Fear and Anger can’t keep Riley the happy person she is and if the two don’t find their way back to Headquarters, Riley’s whole personality and all her feelings are threatened with disappearing completely. 

Pixar has done it again! Aside from maybe Cars and possibly Planes (which admittedly I haven’t seen) Pixar are yet to produce a bad movie. Inside Out is no exception. This beautiful animated feature tells are a wonderfully fresh and original story about friendship, the importance of balance and the significant message that you need badness in order to really appreciate the good. We’ve seen the scenarios where toys have feelings, cars have feelings, monsters have feelings, robots have feelings, bugs have feelings, sea creatures have feelings, and now we see what would happen if feelings had feelings. 

Firstly, the story is really lovely. Not only is it a bit of psychology and hormones explained to a young audience in a much less confusing way, it’s this gorgeous little story of unlikely friendship that explores the pull of duty as well as the idea that without the pain of sadness, the best moments of joy cannot be completely appreciated. More than anything it’s a story about balance and what happens when that balance gets completely thrown into disarray. 

Depicting just how temperamental the human mind can be, the story is just beautiful and what’s really lovely about it is that it features these characters that very well could have been made clichéd and caricatured, but they weren’t. Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Fear, and Anger all are exactly what their names indicate, but they’re not over-the-top, which I really liked. There’s a good balance of emotions in each of them rather than them being made up of one feeling and I really loved this because it made them real characters and brought more depth and complexity to the story; much more emotion so to speak. The whole thing is just beautiful. 

And of course, Pixar strikes again with dazzling animation! The world of Riley’s mind is beautiful, made up of ‘personality islands’ that look like floating themed parks, opaque shimmering marbles that are her memories line the sky-high golden shelves of long-term memory, her subconscious is dark and labyrinthine, and then there’s the five central characters up in headquarters. Joy, Anger, Sadness, Fear, and Disgust all have this sort of shimmering texture about them, it actually almost looks like they’re made up of the texture of popping candy and it’s really pretty because it’s both strange and appealing, it looks normal from a distance, but then you get up closer and you see that their skin is very different in texture to human skin. There’s almost this unsolidness to it with little spores sometimes staying behind when they move quickly. It’s almost like each is in their own little dust particle cloud, you know how pretty dust particles look when they’re listing about lazily in the air in the middle of a sun-ray? That’s what these characters look like and it’s gorgeous! 

Featuring the voice talents of Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Richard kind, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, Kaitlyn Dias, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, Paula Poundstone, Bobby Moynihan, Paula Pell, Dave Goelz, and Frank Oz, Inside Out is another stunning and gorgeous triumph for Pixar filled with emotions, friendship, journeys, drama, suspense, comedy, and cleverness. What’s particularly wonderful about this movie and all Pixar movies in general, is that they really are films for the entire family. The bright colours and the characters and the settings are what get the kids in, but for the adults these movies have cleverness and quite a large mature level of content and jokes. You gotta love Pixar and Inside Out is another absolutely beautiful film that it can boast having in its repertoire. I adored it!