Pete Docter (2015)

I went to see Inside Out at HMV Curzon in Wimbledon rather than the Richmond Odeon.  The Curzon is a lot more comfortable and I guessed there wouldn’t be so many kids there.  I guessed right but didn’t expect to be the only person in the audience.  I’m used to being one of the select few at lunchtime film shows I but never imagined it would be a Disney-Pixar smash that provided my first completely private viewing at a public cinema.  When there’s hardly anyone else in the audience, I worry the management will require a minimum critical mass and, if they don’t get it, call the screening off:  this show was the closest I’ve come to having my neurosis vindicated.  As the lights went down, one of the staff came in and asked if I was intending to watch Inside Out.  When I replied yes, he said they hadn’t sold any tickets for the screening.  I’d booked online, as usual, and I produced the ticket I’d been emailed.  He apologised and went on his way, leaving me wondering if the film would have been shown to an empty auditorium – and with an unexpected sense of responsibility towards Inside Out. 

Neither the commercials beforehand nor Lava, Pixar’s curtain-raiser short, prepares you for the novelty of Pete Docter’s latest feature.  The commercials seem par for the course.  Every second advert was promoting Inside Out and/or spin-off merchandise.  It evidently doesn’t matter that the Inside Out artefacts that kids are being enticed to collect include Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust:  association with a hit movie trumps the potentially lowering effect of their negative essences.  Lava is about a lonesome volcano.  To the accompaniment of a ukulele, he sings of his loneliness and gradually sinks under the sea.  He doesn’t realise that a female volcano, also a singleton, is responding to his song:  she starts off underwater but, over the aeons, rises up.  I haven’t seen enough animated films to know whether the sentimental anthropomorphising of geological formations is novel but Lava doesn’t feel at all original.  Its protagonist is a foolishly amiable (seeming) no-hoper – familiar, in human or anthropomorphised animal form, from plenty of other cartoons.  I wasn’t sure what happened to the cute dolphins in the ocean when Lava’s climactic volcanic explosion enabled the romantic leads to meet each other halfway.

These preliminaries threw into relief the inventiveness of Inside Out.   With a screenplay by Docter, Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley, the film is about a girl called Riley and the personified emotions that dominate her eleven-year-old mind.  It begins with a quick run-through of Riley’s birth and childhood in Minnesota; the main story is triggered by Riley’s moving with her parents to San Francisco when her father gets a job there.  An only child, she misses Minnesota, where she especially loved playing ice hockey, and struggles to adapt to her new home and school.  The five dominant emotions inside Riley – Joy, as well as Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust – inhabit Headquarters, Riley’s conscious mind, where they influence, through a control console, what she does and feels.  Riley’s recent memories, contained in coloured orbs sent into storage at the end of each day, may either persist or fade.  The destination of the ones that fade is a Memory Dump.  Unalterable ‘core’ memories, housed in a hub within Headquarters, generate and sustain the five ‘personality islands’ of Riley’s psyche.

The self-appointed leader of the emotions is Joy; as a result, Riley’s life to date has been predominantly happy but the move to San Francisco threatens to upset the established order in Headquarters.  To Joy’s consternation, Sadness begins touching and thereby saddening happy memories.  On Riley’s first day at her new school, Sadness causes Riley to cry in front of her class and this creates a sad core memory.  Joy attempts to prevent its reaching the hub but, in a struggle with Sadness, destabilises the other core memories.  As a result, the personality islands are disabled; Joy and Sadness (and Riley’s core memories) are sucked, through a ‘memory tube’, out of Headquarters. They find themselves in the storage area of Riley’s long-term memories, from where they embark on attempts to return to Headquarters.  During what proves to be a tortuous journey, they meet up with Bing Bong, an imaginary childhood friend, who wants to renew his friendship with Riley.  Bing Bong tells Joy and Sadness they can get back to Headquarters by riding the Train of Thought.  The trio gets on the train but it’s derailed by the crumbling of a personality island.

In the world outside her head, Riley is planning to leave San Francisco and her parents and return to the Minnesota home where her heart is.  As she prepares to board a bus, Joy tries to get back to Headquarters using a ‘recall tube’:  the last personality island disintegrates, destroys the tube and consigns Joy, with Bing Bong, to the Memory Dump.  There, Joy finds a sad memory in Riley’s life that became happy – when her parents and friends comforted her over the loss of an ice hockey match.  This discovery is a eureka moment.  After her persistent efforts to suppress the influence of Sadness, Joy perceives the value of her antagonist.  Attempts to escape from the Memory Dump using Bing Bong’s wagon rocket are stymied by the combined weight of Joy and, mainly, Bing Bong.  He self-sacrificingly ejects, enabling Joy to escape alone.   Joy then deploys tools from Imagination Land to get herself and Sadness back to Headquarters.

In their absence, the control console has been left in the incapable hands of the other three emotions.  Anger, who inspired Riley’s thoughts of returning to Minnesota, has managed to damage the console but Sadness, encouraged by Joy, repairs it – removing the offending idea from Anger that jammed the works and prompting Riley to think again about leaving home.  She returns to her parents, who comfort and reassure their daughter that she’ll grow to like her new life in San Francisco.  A year later, Riley has adapted to her new home:  Joy and Sadness have joined forces and Riley’s major influences now all work together, enabling her to lead a life emotionally more complex than before but one with which Riley is content.  The facing-up-to-reality aspect of Inside Out is a natural development of Pete Docter’s Up, six years ago, in which aging and loss were important elements of the story; Inside Out‘s putting away of childish things also resonates with the curiously high mortality rate in Disney’s live-action Cinderella earlier this year.  Even so, it still feels remarkable in a film carrying the Walt Disney name that, of the five dominant emotions in Riley’s life, only one is, on the face of it, positive – it’s almost as if Inside Out is advising Disney Studios, as well as Joy, to learn the error of their coercively optimistic ways.  Yet the film, while subverting Disney tradition, also places itself within that tradition.  Inside Out promotes the importance of emotional balance and maturity with as much moral certainty as Pinocchio inveighed against the evils of juvenile hedonistic fecklessness.

As well as being technically ingenious and a cleverly constructed story, Inside Out has plenty of verbal wit.   When Joy and Sadness board the Train of Thought, Bing Bong exults in the mental panorama before them:  ‘You can see everything from here – déjà vu, inductive reasoning, critical thinking, déjà vu …’  There are jokes for cinephiles:  in a sequence set in ‘Cloud Town’, one cloud says to another, ‘Forget it, Jake, it’s …’.   Much as I enjoyed these things, they do underline the large disjuncture between what children and adults are likely to get out of Inside Out (albeit parents will obviously enjoy seeing and hearing their kids enjoying the film).  The cleverness of the emotion personification conceit tends to encourage you to take issue with some of the details.   Joy is something of a misnomer:  she’s really Positive Thinking.   Whereas she and Sadness work effectively as polar opposites, the dynamics of Fear, Anger and Disgust aren’t so well defined. (Pete Docter and his co-writers realise that and relegate them to supporting roles.)  Disgust introduces herself as the representation of the infant Riley’s feelings about broccoli but she’s assigned her nature for the sake of this one good joke:  her subsequent behaviour characterises her as Sarcasm rather than Disgust (and all the more incongruous as a key player in the head of someone as young as Riley).  The film’s cleverness also made me feel stupid, though:  I didn’t understand the relationship between personality islands and the dominant emotional forces.  We’re not only shown the counterparts to Riley’s ‘humours’ in a variety of other psyches (those of her parents and, as part of a witty and entertaining finale, canine and feline psyches too).   We’re also given a preview of what’s in store for Riley and her generation as adolescence kicks in.  The implication of the preview is that the main emotions will continue to change – but they seem not to have changed at all in the first eleven years of Riley’s life.   I wasn’t clear, given the moral of the story, why Nostalgia didn’t emerge, at its conclusion, as an important newcomer in her head.

The volcanoes in Lava are visually unappealing (to put it mildly).  In Inside Out, the contrasting shapes and clashing colours of the five personified emotions are fine but the untextured faces and disproportionately large heads of Riley and her parents aren’t easy on the eye:  Pixar’s simulation of human movement is so expert that the from-the-neck-upwards difference between their creations and real people is jarring.  The voices heard in the film are impeccable, though.   Amy Poehler is outstanding as Joy, an indefatigably cheerful bossy-boots, and Phyllis Black’s Sadness complements her perfectly.  The aural cast also includes Bill Hader (Fear), Lewis Black (Anger), Mindy Kaling (Disgust), Richard Kind (Bing Bong), Kaitlyn Dias (Riley), Diane Lane (Riley’s mother) and Kyle MacLachlan (Riley’s father).  As in Up, the music is by Michael Giacchino.   Since I usually complain about Jonathan Romney, I should note that his piece about Inside Out in the August 2015 Sight and Sound is excellent.

6 August 2015