Disney/Pixar's
Inside Out tells the story of 11- year-old Riley Andersen, uprooted from her
home in Minnesota and carted off to San Francisco, where her father just landed
a new job. On the cusp of adolescence, Riley is completely unprepared for the
mental and emotional turmoil the move is about to cause herself and her family;
her parents, likewise, can't understand why their little girl, once so bright
and open and the light of their lives, suddenly turns so irritable and distant.
Ultimately, Riley is able to reconcile her feelings and make up with Mom and
Dad (SPOILER), and they live in perfect harmony together forever after. All
this, of course, is just the springboard for the really interesting stuff, in
which we learn that Riley's emotions are sentient beings operating a giant
control room inside her head. There's Joy, green-yellow and eternally
optimistic; Anger, who's always on the verge of blowing his red brick top;
Fear, a bug-eyed purple nebbish; Disgust, who can barely hide the look of
disdain on her face; and Sadness, mopey and morose and blue. So far, Joy has
been Riley's dominant personality trait, until circumstances force Sadness to
challenge that position, and when both Joy and Sadness are ejected from
headquarters and plunged deeper into the recesses of Riley's brain, it's up to
Anger, Fear, and Disgust to keep up appearances - with often disastrous
results.
Suffice it to say
Inside Out is unlike anything Pixar has ever attempted before - eye-popping and
funny and heartfelt, yes, but clearly conceived as a metaphor for the way our
emotions sometimes get the better of us... and how our children learn to cope
with those emotions during their formative years, much to the chagrin of their
parents. It's an idea rife with dramatic possibilities, which director Pete
Docter (Up) and co-screenwriters Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley are consistently
able to mine for comedy and visual gold. (I haven't even begun to describe
Riley's "Personality Islands," or the color-coded translucent orbs in
which her memories are "stored" and then carted off to Long Term
Memory when she sleeps, or Bing Bong, or the stopovers in Imagination Land or -
my personal favorite - Abstract Thought, where the characters are rendered as
cubist shapes that would make Picasso proud.)
