Most of us don’t spend our days thinking of where our thoughts come from, or how we think, or why we think. Pete Docter, the director of the Pixar masterpiece Up, isn’t like most of us.
In his latest film, Inside Out, arguably the most existential title in the luminous Pixar canon, he has gone beyond thinking about the inner workings of the brain. He’s conceived an elaborate neural architecture for all of that synaptic wiring, one that resembles Dr. Seuss, Tim Burton, Frank Baum and Roald Dahl in equal measure, with a bit of Freud, Picasso and Sesame Street thrown in. It’s literally a head trip.
The head belongs to Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), a fun-loving, hockey-playing 11-year-old girl whose parents are relocating the family from Minneapolis to San Francisco — a move that throws her cerebrum, and the five creatures that engineer her emotions, into turmoil. Being the happy frolicker she has always been, her brain’s alpha emotion is Joy (Amy Poehler). But as parental strife, money concerns, a miserable new house and a rough first week at school bear down on Riley’s psyche, her negative emotions begin to upset the apple cart in her brain; Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and Anger (Lewis Black, natch) begin to take larger roles.
Soon enough, her well-ordered blueprint of brain activity, with its Personality Islands and cherished Core Memories, begins to crumble and fade, as if struck by a slowly metastasizing cancer. It’s up to Joy and Sadness, separated from their emotional flock after a freak accident, to repair a mind that seems to be heading inexorably toward loneliness, depression and separation.
Inside Out is many things, all of them wonderful, and it provides another reminder that true originality in modern mainstream cinema begins with Pixar. As we’ve come to expect from the company’s films, harsh truths are delivered in candy colors, but Inside Out’s conclusions are no less profound and therapeutic because of it. The film deals with the inevitability of trauma on even the most well-heeled, well-reared lives, determining that relentless optimism has its limits — that releasing Sadness, rather repressing it, is necessary for a clean bill of emotional health.
But beyond its elucidating impact, it’s just a thrilling cinematic hodgepodge that lands somewhere between road movie, buddy comedy and coming-of-age narrative, as ineffably charming as it is heartstring-tugging. Docter, who also wrote the screenplay, sees the forest of his elaborate story as well as its individual trees. The movie’s grand design is consistent and rewarding, but so are its constituent parts, many of them inspiring the film’s best (and most adult) jokes.
Joy and Sadness journey to the Subconscious Basement (a shadowy fortress with armed guards) and visit with Dream Productions (where clichéd nightmares are “directed” by a bad TV auteur). There are jokes about how earworms stick in our heads, a Train of Thought that shuttles passengers from one mental region to the next and, in the film’s wittiest segment, a foray into Abstract Thought, in which Docter plays with depth, dimension and symbolism in novel ways. This is surely the first and last screenplay for a 3D children’s blockbuster to employ the term “nonobjective fragmentation.”
But perhaps Inside Out is most affecting because it fulfills an elemental wish — to have a group of selfless people, or creatures, or beings that exist solely for our benefit, whose very profession is predicated on our health and happiness. This idea has propelled everything from the scripts of House, where medical experts racked their genius brains to bring dying patients back from the brink, to the recent trend of so-called “heaven tourism” books, which conceive an afterlife of spirit guides who watch over our actions and intervene when necessary. Even for nonbelievers, it’s comforting to think that when times are tough, we might just get by with a little help from our friends.
INSIDE OUT. Director: Pete Docter; Cast: Voices of Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Kaitlyn Dias, Richard Kind, Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling, Lewis Black, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, Paula Poundstone; Distributor: Disney; Rating: PG; Opens: Friday