Deep Dive Disney: Wes Looks at Inside Out

Welcome everyone, to Deep Dive Pixar, the imaginary friend of Deep Dive Disney. I’m going to be honest about this right up front, I didn’t like this movie. I fully understand that I’m in the minority here as many really love this movie, but it just didn’t do it for me. It’s not awful like Cars or Bolt, but it’s not really for me. I will admit, the movie’s message is powerful, the world is incredibly creative and there are a few scenes that are pretty great, but for the most part, I found the characters to be annoying and the plot to be slow and uninteresting. What I’m trying to say is, the film just wasn’t my cup of tea. So what are we dealing with? Well, Inside Out tells the story of Riley, an eleven-year-old girl who has recently moved to San Francisco from Minnesota and it having a difficult time emotionally coping with having left her home and all her friends behind. And if that had been all there was to it, this movie probably would have been just fine. Not good, not great, but fine. But no, that’s not what we get, is it. No, we have to spend all our time with the visual representations of Riley’s emotions, specifically, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. Once Riley moves, it literally throws her emotions into chaos, especially when Sadness keeps inadvertently turning Riley’s happy memories into sad ones. When Sadness accidentally turns one of the core memories, the memories that were deeply important to Riley and help shape her personality, Joy and Sadness, along with all the core memories, are accidentally jettisoned from emotion headquarters and must find their way home before Fear, Disgust and Sadness fuck everything up. Like I said, not exactly my cup of tea. Frankly, if I wanted to spend ninety minutes in the mind of a neurotic pre-teen who overthinks everything, I’d just go back to middle school. Let’s just get into, Inside Out.

Main Character:

I think the problem with having your major characters each personify a single emotion is that they often end up being pretty one note, sometimes obnoxiously so. As such, there really isn’t much I can say about Riley’s emotions as characters. Joy is obnoxiously happy all the time and sadness is obnoxiously sad. Amy Poehler and Phyllis Smith do their best to elevate these characters beyond that, but they can only do so much. For the most part, they’re just pretty annoying, and the fact that we have to spend the entire movie with them doesn’t do anything to further endear me to them. I do appreciate that Sadness is actually really smart and can sometimes be very helpful when other characters are feeling sad, something that ties into the theme of the film, but her constant whining about how no one loves her gets really grating after a while. Joy doesn’t fare much better as she’s constantly assuming that she knows best and inadvertently causes much of the problems in the story. Overall, spending the whole movie with these two was not a pleasant experience.

Side Characters:

No primary antagonist this time around so we’re skipping right on into the side characters. Much like Joy and Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust don’t have too much going on. Angery is always angry, Fear is always scared, and Disgust is one of those mean girl types who you just want to punch in the face. Anger actually gets a couple of lines that make me chuckle, but that’s mostly down to the fact that he’s played by perpetually pissed off standup comedian Lewis Black.

The only other character of note in the film is Bing Bong, Riley’s imaginary friend who Joy and Sadness encounter in Riley’s subconscious. Best I can figure, Bing Bong is one of the Pink Elephants from Dumbo who got fired from his job of traumatizing a drunken baby elephant, volunteered for various morally questionable medical experiments to support his substance abuse habit and now hangs out in the mind of a prepubescent girl living the life of a train jumping hobo. Richard Kind is a great actor, like the rest of the characters in Riley’s head, I found Bing Bong mostly annoying, even factoring in his noble and symbolic sacrifice at the end.

Memorable Scenes:

Alright, for as much as this movie irritated me, there were a couple of scenes that I rather enjoyed. First, there’s this scene where Riley is having a tense moment during dinner with her parents and we periodically cut to the emotions inside each of their heads, who treat the whole ordeal like a naval battle. It’s actually pretty cool, and I got a couple of good laughs at the wife thinking about her Brazilian ex-lover. Also, this scene raises an interesting thought. All of Riley’s Dad’s emotions are male. All of Riley’s Mom’s emotions are female. However, Riley’s emotions are comprised of male and female characters. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but does this mean that Riley has transgender or gender non-binary tendencies? I feel like exploring that idea would have been infinitely more interesting than the movie we actually ended up with.

However, I need to talk about the big emotional payoff. Anger, Disgust and Fear come up with the idea for Riley to run away to Minnesota and she almost goes through with it before Joy and Sadness return. Riley returns home and Joy allows Sadness to take the console and turn the core memories into sad ones. This finally allows Riley, who up to this point has been trying her best to put on a brave face about her new situation, to open up about how much she misses her old home and her friend, breaking down completely in front of her parents. Now, finally addressing and properly processing these feelings of sadness instead of trying to bottle them up, Riley is able to let go and move on. This also allows her parents to open up as well and those feelings of sadness can finally become feelings of relief. It’s a powerful scene. I’m not sure it was worth all the annoyance that led up to it, but it definitely hits the mark perfectly in terms of its intended emotional impact.

Story:

I think the story would be obvious at this point. That being, it’s okay to sad sometimes. It’s okay to let your emotions out and express yourself because when you bottle it up, you can’t properly process those emotions and you can’t move past them. Riley finally allows herself to feel Sadness… or Joy does, it’s complicated when you’re dealing with visual metaphors like this, and she’s finally able to let go of her pain and thrive in her new surroundings. See, emotions, real emotions, aren’t as simple as four brightly colored cartoon characters in a big control room. Emotions are complex. Sometimes one needs to feel sadness in order to feel joy. Disgust can lead to fear. Sometimes fear can lead to anger, anger can lead to hate and hate can lead to… sorry, that’s a different movie, but you get my point. One thing I actually like is how at the end of the film, the orbs representing Riley’s memories are now multi-colored, meaning she associates those memories with more than just one emotion, a nice reflection of her more mature mindset.

The Dark Disney Factor:

Since this is a movie that primarily takes place in the dark recesses of the troubled mind of an overly emotional eleven-year-old, the film naturally doesn’t skimp on The Dark Disney Factor. At one point, Bing Bong just casual murders a man. It was a man made of clouds, so it wasn’t that hard, but still. We also get a glimpse into Riley’s nightmares, which feature a dog getting split in half, that’s pretty fucked up. We also get to see Riley’s various islands of personality including her sense of silliness, her connection to her friends, her love of hockey and more slowly crumble into oblivion as Riley’s unhealthy way of dealing with her emotions slowly causes her to retreat into a state of apathy. Did I mention the part where Joy, Sadness and Bing Bong take an ill-fated shortcut through the area of the mind that processes abstract concepts and things get super trippy as the three are distorted as their slowly broken down into total abstraction. Oh, what about the part where Joy and Sadness go into the deepest darkest part of Riley’s subconscious and wake up a literal giant nightmare clown who proceeds to go on a rampage! Oh, and finally, there’s the part at the end where Joy and Bing Bong end up in the memory dump where things go to be forgotten forever. The only way for Joy to escape is for Bing Bong to sacrifice himself, fading away into oblivion as he says his farewell. Jesus! I may have found the guy irritating, but no one deserves that.

Final Thoughts

This movie just isn't for me. I will freely admit that the message it puts forward is a powerful one and in that aspect, I'd call it a resounding success. However, just because the movie is good at presenting its message, the film itself isn't necessarily an enjoyable experience as a result. In my opinion, this film would have worked much better as a twenty minute short played before a movie instead of as a full length feature film, but that's just me. Now, as much as I would love to skip ahead to Zootopia, for our next article, which will be on the 2015 Disney Channel movie, Descendants, we're going to be doing things a little differently than normal. See you next time.