Inside Out Review - Can you feel the feels?
So I recently watched the movie Inside Out, and I figured I wanted to voice my opinion about it. Inside Out is an animation movie made by Pixar and was released in 2015. Does this review contain spoilers? Mabye... but rather small I would say.
To start of this review/comment I would like to get the technical aspects out of the way first. As to be expected, it being a Pixar movie, the animation is fantastic! The characters looks great, has nice details and the movement is smooth. In other words I have nothing to complain about on that side, and the same story goes for the sound assets.
The movie starts out with a baby girl named Riley being born, and then there is Joy… Yeah literally, Joy is there. Inside Out’s topic is emotions and it depicts the emotions as characters controlling Riley’s brain. The brain quickly gets filled with the other emotions Fear, Anger, Disgust and of course Sadness. You quickly realise that the former and latter is the most central characters in the movie.
One of the first things that struck me was how Pixar interpreted the brain and brought it into a movie. Of course it doesn’t look realistic in any shape or fashion, but that’s not what’s important. What is important however, and what they did a terrific job at, is to make it feel realistic. I got so fascinated by how they built the “world”, from different islands where special memories get stored, which builds up her personality, and to the Memory dump where memories go to fade away. This and all the bits in between somehow feels authentic. A great example here is a scene in the movie where Riley “Looses her train of thought”, I just thought it was so clever, and it really made me smile!
That is not the only clever part, far from. While Riley goes through her childhood it’s not only fun and games of course, there are events that can be quite dramatic for a young kid. These are events that are common in real life too, and are translated really well into this movie. It even has a scene that I interpreted as a beginning of depression, where the emotions got shut out and Riley didn’t feel anything. Of course what happens on screen is not realistic in a literal sense, but if you analyze it you can find quite the deep plot here, which is great!
Considering it being a Disney Pixar movie, you will probably expect it to be rather funny. For Inside Out this is true to some extent, although I will say that the humour is a bit tuned down when compared to other Pixar made movies. This is not a bad thing however! Because of the topic I found it to be just the right balance between jokes and seriousness, which means it’s both appealing to kids that don’t think too much about the subject, and for adults that may not find the jokes and goofs all that funny.
Watching the movie I had a very pleasant viewing experience. It almost felt like going through my own emotional roller coaster, a bit of joy, a bit of sadness and bits and bobs of things in between. While watching the movie I also got reminded of a lot of old memories, which probably is the main reason I felt so many emotions during the film. I am quite the nostalgic person, resulting in often getting emotional when thinking back on memories that I’ve had.
As I said earlier Joy and Sadness is basically the main characters in Inside Out. While looking at reviews on IMDb I saw people commenting about this, how the others didn’t get enough screentime. While I don’t think it would hurt to show Anger and the others a bit more, I think there is good reason that specifically Joy and Sadness is so central in the story. Because when you think about it, what is the emotions you feel the most? For my own part I’m usually happy, I might get worried, angry or disgusted, but in the end I always end up being either sad or glad. If I’m angry it’s just for a little while, then I may think about why I actually got angry and end up sad or laughing. Therefore Joy and Sadness is the main characters with good reason.
9/10 - Almost all the feels
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