The Uniqueness of Inside Out

Starting in 1995, Pixar has rolled out animation greats beginning with the groundbreaking Toy Story all the way to the upcoming Luca this year. Throughout the years, the animation has vastly improved ( a great way to observe this is seeing how the animation improved through all 4 Toy Story movies). Something that Pixar is known for is their themes: toys, monsters, cars, bugs, superheroes etc. Some movies, like UP, don’t have a specific theme- they just tell a good story with a heartfelt message. Others like Coco and Brave have general themes (medieval princess & Dia De Los Muertos) instead of making all their characters one specific type of thing. As with all creations, the best ideas are always used at the beginning and the middle of its tenure as that is when all the originality is best used. Over time, artists and creators have to work harder to create something that was as good as before. This is generally true with tv shows, movie sequels, music albums, and videogame sequels. Pixar is great, there’s no doubt, but it’s not perfect. From 1995-2010 it was on an unstoppable roll with that roll ending with Toy Story 3. After the hit that was Toy Story, Pixar’s success ascended in 1998 with Bug’s Life and hit a peak in 1999 with Toy Story 2 and stayed on that peak through 2001, 2003, and 2004 with Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, and Incredibles, respectively. With Cars it hit a plateau for a bit in 2006 then began ascending again through 2007 with Ratatouille and peaked again from 2008-2010 with Wall-E, Up, and Toy Story 3, respectively. After this, Pixar began to fall and fell to a plateau that did not see the same quality that came before it. This included Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University, Inside Out, The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory, and Cars 3 with Pixar picking up their momentum again with Coco in late 2017. This isn’t to say that the aforementioned films are bad, just that they pale comparison to the list of hits that came before. Cars 2 is not as unbearable as a lot of people make it out to be but it leaves MUCH to be desired compared to the first but the trilogy is redeemed with Cars 3. Brave offers nothing special- Wreck It Ralph, which came out the same year, would have served as a much better substitute for a Pixar movie not only because of how good it was but because it had a cooler theme- videogame characters. Monsters Uni is a satisfying sequel/prequel as is Finding Dory but Finding Dory feels redundant- did we really care about Dory’s backstory that much? She was a supporting character in the first one whereas Mike and Sully are the main characters of Monsters Inc, so we care more about how they became good pals. Good Dinosaur and Inside Out both released in 2015 and The Good Dinosaur to this day stands as Pixar’s lowest point. I won’t get into why but it definitely was way below what Pixar is truly capable of, it felt like they were being lazy for that one time.

Anyways, we’re here to talk about Inside Out which released in the summer of 2015. Inside Out is the 15th Pixar film to be released. Prior to this movie, we’d seen toys, bugs, monsters, fish, superheroes, cars, rats with cooking passion, robots, and now emotions. Emotions are not as easy to play around with and writing a story about as one would think. Up to this point, all the themes would be anthropomorphic versions of themselves given human characteristics, feelings, behaviors, and thoughts except for the Incredibles of course who are already humans and the robots in WALL-E which are different artificial life forms given life to them by humans, nonetheless, WALL-E and EVE demonstrated the ability to fall in love. They all show emotion in one capacity or another i.e. Woody’s jealousy, Marlin’s fear, the Parr family caring about each other, Lightning McQueen’s desire to be the fastest etc. Inside Out tackles representing emotions themselves which are personified so to speak. I am going to delve into Inside Out’s strengths and weaknesses in the next paragraph.

First off, I wanna praise the workers at Pixar for even tackling this concept. Emotions are very complicated and aren’t easy to analyze no matter what age you are. We have the basic emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, and happiness and more complicated emotions such as jealousy and love. The latter two are more involved with how we feel about or towards someone and those are more complex. The movie seems more child-oriented than anything and has very surface-level messages whereas other films like Toy Story or Finding Nemo or Coco are layered and have depth whereas this one is on-the-nose. I know it’s a children’s film as are all Pixar films but some are very mature like UP in contrast to this one and I don’t quite agree with the message the movie seems to convey- that people are basically controlled by their emotions. The film’s main character is not Riley as one would think but is actually Happiness and Sadness together. Riley is just a husk being controlled by 4 emotions akin to aliens in Men in Black. They operate and control everything she does and if even the slightest thing goes amiss, Riley can go insane. A kid won’t think twice about this but they’ll realize it when they’re older. Everything about how Riley reacts from the things she says to how she treats her friends to even what she dreams about is dependent on her emotions and if there were none in there to operate the brain factory, Riley would basically be a vegetable. They make her choices for her. People are basically controllable robots in this movie.

For what it turned out to be however, it was impressive that they put together a nice story with charming characters. It wasn’t really Riley we cared about, it was the emotions. There were bound to be flaws from trying to use such a complex concept and I know they kept it to 4 to keep it simple for children but if there were to be a sequel they should introduce emotions such as disappointment, greed, excitement, embarrassment, love, and others to make a more complex story and a more complex Riley which would make sense as Riley is becoming a teenager as we saw at the end of the film, and as her mind matures, more emotions would come into play. Overall I like the movie, probably as much as I like Cars and Cars 3 which I put each at around 7.5/10.