Just went to see Inside Out. And I have to say the praise is well deserved and I don't say that often. I knew this was a tricky subject for any film company to do but if anyone was going to manage it, it was Pixar. Did I mention it was AMAZING!!
The best part of this movie is the fact that it isn't just a well made movie for kids. It means so much more. It holds up well enough to just enjoy it as a light hearted kids movie but for the adults that have been through the trauma of life, this can mean a WHOLE different thing. The movie is so deep I think most people won't understand just how with it this movie really is. With that said. Here are a few specifics about the movie and warning. SPOILERS ALERT!! DO NOT READ ANY OF THE TEXT AFTER THIS UNLESS YOU HAVE SEEN THIS MOVIE BECAUSE I AM NOT HOLDING BACK!
So the simple way of putting it is the movie is about the emotions of a little girl as she moves to a new town and has to experience new things she isn't used to. The deeper meaning of this movie is that is about having a break down. What happens in your head when everything goes wrong and you don't know how to react. You aren't experienced enough to know how to deal with it and you have to learn a very tough life's lesson. You need to understand and analyse yourself, in order to make things better. You can't just try to be happy all the time and ignore everything wrong. You have to face the bad in order to learn and grow as a person. That is essentially what the movie is all about.
I think, if you know me, you might already have guessed my favourite character is sadness. I feel like I can really understand her as I have felt and acted like her a LOT of times before. She even dresses like me. OMG! Something I noticed was that all the characters are dressed like a person who has that emotion as a primary emotion to drive their actions. Interesting. Seriously, look at them.
OK. Need to start from the beginning. So. The movie starts with the main character, a young girl called Riley (sorry if I spell it wrong) being born. It is interesting how it portrays not only the emotions of this girl in the main part of the movie but it also shows us the characters appearing for the first time in order for us to understand a bit more of what they are about. I like this introduction and I find the way they did it very interesting. Do emotions really just appear when needed? Or are they always there and just not active? This movie makes for a few thought provoking ideas and makes the movie very interesting from a psychological and theoretical stand point and I love thinking about in depth things like this so of course I love exploring this interesting concept. Not only that but we can see the emotions in her head changing and growing as she grows, showing that these emotions really do reflect who she is rather than just controlling her like little aliens inside her head. A much better way to do it and I am so glad they didn't just go with the, there are really just individual creatures inside her head who control the characters actions clique. This idea is further supported throughout the movie as it might seem like they are controlling her on first glance but when you take time to think about it and the movie goes on, it becomes more clear that fate has a bigger hand in this and what is happening will happen anyway. The characters are just reflections to represent what is happening, not a direction reason for it happening. In fact, you may notice that all that Joy and sadness does is just delaying the problems and not causing or solving them. Why was sadness compelled to touch the core memories. Because she HAD to. It was what she was there for and not matter how much she tried to stop herself, it happened anyway. This is much like what being a person is like. You can tell yourself with your consciousness over and over what you should do but when push comes to shove you will do things irrationally and I think that is a main thing this movie is trying to portray here. But anyways, I am talking about the broader picture again. Onto movie details.
So she grows up. And everything seems to be OK. Core things in her life have caused her to be who she is and she is developing fine and is happy. Until, however, there is a suddenly change to her life where she is forced to leave her home town to somewhere totally different. No more friends, new school, new shops, new house (which isn't even furnished for like a few weeks!). So no stuff she is used to anymore. Everything she ever knew was scrapped and replaced with a whole lot of stuff she has never experienced. Obviously this is hard on her and worries her but she tries to make the most of it like a person should. However, she soon discovers that her family are struggling to and they so don't have much support to give right now so she can't really get any comfort to help along the way. And to make matters worse, the mum tells her to try and stay happy as it helps them all through it. This causes her to feel obliged to stay happy even when she just wants to be sad. And with this, comes the whole dilemma. She keeps her emotions inside and this causes everything to go wrong. Oh boy. I know how this feels. I am autistic, a teenager (in my mind anyways) and I live with several disabled people. Life is hard already but a lot of feelings I have to keep inside because if I don't, I can cause more stress for everyone else as they are already struggling with their own problems. And with no other friends to speak of...its fair to say I understand this all too well. I felt like this movie really spoke to me as I am kinda going through something similar right now. My emotions are all over the place and I am finding it hard to adjust to life now I have left college and sometimes I try to keep myself happy but really I am just covering up my feelings of how worried I am about my future. This correlates to the movie a LOT. But enough about me. On with the show.
So in the commotion of a bad first day at school and not having very much to be happy about her new home in general. Missing her friends, her old hockey club, her old shops and streets, her happy parents. After the bad day at school and joy tries to fix everything something goes wrong and all the core memories that make her, her, get taken away along with sadness and joy. Then without those important emotions, the others don't know how to act, making Riley act weird for weeks after. This is the start of her break down. She has lost control over her emotions and doesn't know how to handle them. Joy and sadness try to find their way back but the longer they are away, the worse things get. Without her joy and sadness to help, things are much harder to handle. One by one all her favourite things get shattered. Her goofiness goes first as she is too unhappy to act like that. Then her love of hockey is shattered when she too upset to play properly and embarrasses herself with the new team. She also misses her old team and friends. Then the final nail in the coffin to make it all too bad to handle is that her old friend mentions she is going out with someone else now. She feels she has lost her old friends and so she feels depressed and lonely. Things are going very badly so while joy and sadness are away, anger decides to take action and make the decision to run away from home so she can be happy again. Things go from bad to worse from here.
Joy and sadness meet Bing Bong. An old imaginary friend who tries to help them along the way. I love this guy. I always have a bit of a soft spot for these silly characters. He tries to take them across various shortcuts to try and get back to the main control area to fix everything as fast as possible. This is where Pixar use the opportunity to show in depth how this world they have made to represent the mind really works. I find the details of all this so interesting. Everything makes sense and ties in with each other. Showing just how complex the human mind really is. Imagination, sub conscious, train of thought, dreams. There are so many things that makes everything work and this movie really helps to show how it all ties in with each other and how seemingly unconnected things can go horribly wrong when one of the things goes wrong to start a chain of destruction. It is a perfect representation of how the mind can winds itself into complete collapse just with too much things going on at once or one big thing goes wrong. How a person can stir themselves into depression by thinking too negatively or not knowing what to think. Have I explained it enough? I feel like I just can't explain it properly as it is just so good and so deep. Some of it is probably so deep that I know it is there but just too hard to me to understand enough to explain. Its so frustrating! So I hope you get my point. I will continue and skip a lot of this joy and sadness running around section as most of it is good but not essential for explaining the main story, especially since this is for people who have seen the movie anyway.
So basically, as joy and sadness run around with Bing Bong, there are a few times where sadness knows what the wise thing is to do but joy doesn't want to do it as it makes Riley sad, the things she is trying to stop in the first place. For example, the dream scene where they need to wake her so they can ride the thought train but when sadness suggests to scare her awake, joy doesn't like the idea. However, she soon realises that her plan doesn't work and sadness' plan does. Joy starts to understand that sadness does in fact have some uses but still doesn't truly understand that she is needed until nearing the end of the movie where Joy and Bing Bong get caught in the memory dump. When all hope is lost, Joy starts to look over her old memories that she had almost forgotten and then makes a realisation that one of the most happy memories came from being sad in the first place. There cannot be happiness without sadness to counteract it. They are contrasting emotions so they must both be there for everything to work. The mind is a complex thing and you can't just be happy all the time because happiness comes from understanding what makes you sad. You are happy when you know that the things that are sad are not affecting you at the time. At this point, joy finally realises that joy and sadness both are needed to make Riley a complete and overall happier person in the future and so she makes the effort to escape the memory dump and get back to the headquarters (I just got that joke. I see what you did there Pixar. Godammit you are smart).
Then...did anyone cry when BingBong sacrificed himself? I did and I am not ashamed. It means a lot to me as I knew it represented more than just the silly character dying. It also represented letting go of your childhood in favour of growing into an adult. As soon as I saw him, I knew it was coming but it didn't stop it from being so sad. But I am glad he wasn't rescued in the end as that was a needed part of the story. Riley needed to drop her past in order to grow for the better. It's sad but it is something we all have to face someday. We can't stay children forever, no matter how much we may want to or sometimes even delude ourselves into thinking we haven't lost it. We don't have to forget but we have to understand that we don't need it anymore and move on to greater things.
Another thing I liked about the movie was that Riley didn't go back to her old home. That would have been a easy fix for the problem but they stuck to their gums and did it right. THANK YOU PIXAR! It could have been easy to just take her back so everything was fine or have her friends all move there to or something stupid like that but that would only say that if you wait long enough, everything will get better in your favour. Many kids movies do this and it isn't right. This movie taught a much better message that was the right message. Things don't always go your way and sometimes there is just nothing you can do but it is up to you to understand yourself and your problem and get through it yourself. Notice that through the whole movie, the turmoil was within herself and her parents weren't involved with a lot of it. No-one helped her. No-one just made it easier by just telling her how to fix it. You fixed it herself and that is the best damn message for a kids movie. You can't always wish upon a star. Things happen and you have to deal with them. That's life.
Then when I was already very much satisfied beyond any expectations I had, then movie gave me yet another pleasant surprise with the ending credits having a scene where it showed the different background characters throughout the movie and how their brains worked as well. It was a joke but it was also very clever as it filled pretty much all the holes in the idea of the movie. Everything was covered in the end and there is nothing better than that. It even referred to the next stage of puberty coming up in her life so it suggested that it will continue throughout her life. I just hope they don't make a terrible sequel that would discredit the entire movie. Please don't Pixar or Disney. Please don't. Leave well alone.
So that is the massive analysis or at least everything I needed to get off my chest after seeing the movie. Overall, it was the best movie I have seen in years. Move out of the way Frozen, there is a new celebrity in town and for once, this one put in the effort to deserve every praise that it gets. Well done Pixar. Very well done. And good night :3
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