Movie review 'Inside Out': A very mindful masterpiece

Voices Of: Amy Poehler, Kaitlyn Dias, Phyllis Smith, Richard Kind
Director: Pete Docter
Rating: Four and a half stars

With Inside Out, Pixar seems to have made one of the most difficult artistic transitions: from external landscapes to internal psychology. Cinema’s history is dotted with examples of various master-directors arriving at their own solutions to a complex problem: how can the explicit and visible elements of a story depict what is implicit and invisible. The film begins with a question asked in voiceover: “Have you ever wondered what’s going on inside a person’s head?” and then spends its duration in trying to formulate a peculiar (and occasionally batshit-crazy), but brilliant answer.

Not unlike Docter’s debut (Monsters, Inc., like this, a near-masterpiece), the film provides a mechanised, industrial form to what is essentially an enigma: human emotion. We are (literally) inside the head of a little girl called Riley. There are five primary emotions she is prone to: joy, sadness, anger, disgust and fear — all of these are personified as different characters. Depending on the nature of the stimuli, they press a button and cause her to feel in a certain way. This is, like Monsters, Inc., a film set inside a factory, with neatly defined rules that concern storage, indexing, division of labour and professional hierarchies. All is in order, until Riley’s family moves from Minnesota, her hometown, to San Francisco — she is unable to cope with this massive upheaval. There is separation anxiety, sadness, loneliness and confusion that precedes an oncoming teenage. There is a chance that Riley may forever be alienated from her family, unless the emotions resolve to help her clear her head.

As in other Pixar films (the studio’s films are directed and written by different people, but seem to result from a single, coherent philosophy), the child herself becomes only incidental to the story, while those around her (or in this case, inside her) emerge as the real protagonists. It is they who must undertake adventures fraught with peril (and echoes from different genres of film: sci-fi, Indiana Jones action-adventures, road movies) to accomplish a tangential, almost oblique mission: the happiness of the child and her family. This is an interesting approach, for it allows Pixar to sidestep banal sentimentality and handpick a single moment or two to suddenly — without warning — affect melodrama (and it always works in Pixar: consider Anton Ego’s flashback in Ratatouille, and here, the exit of one of the characters).

Pixar’s roster is full of films that exhibit their interest in the rendering of diverse environments (a filmography which therefore resembles the studio’s animators’ personal bucket list): there is water (Finding Nemo), the sky (Up), the space (Wall-E), dusty valley (Cars) and normal, suburban houses (Toy Story). Traditionally, the greatness of Pixar’s animation resides in the photorealism of their animated universes, in the manner in which these retain the physical laws of the actual world. The reason Inside Out is a remarkable departure is because it sets itself inside an environment that is entirely imagined — the human mind — and then sets to invent a governing logic completely indigenous to it. This allows Docter and his team to create sequences of startling (and on occasion, disorienting) imagination: one such, set inside a facility that abstracts/deconstructs thoughts and therefore, causes our protagonists to lose their shape, become formless and almost disappear, is a standout. But there are others: scenes set inside Riley’s subconscious, in her imagination, atop her train of thought, or on a studio lot where dreams are produced by a movie-crew — are excellent examples.

The film’s chief lessons are Pixar 101: acceptance of change as a natural course of life or confrontation of one’s own weaknesses — and the resultant maturity or courage, etc. But what truly sets is the wonderfully odd, lateral manner in which its director, Pete Docter, thinks of subjects that are so common that most filmmakers forget to address them.

The writer is programmer, Lightcube Film Society