I always feel a sense of relief when I see a new Pixar film for the first time. Or almost always; let’s not talk about CARS. Or CARS 2, for that matter. Their shtick is thorough, no-stone-left-unturned filmmaking. They turn every last stone, clean it, polish it and throw it away if it’s not good enough. They are the geologists of cinema, and, unlike geologists, everyone likes looking at their rock collection. So when I go to see a Pixar film, the perfectionist in me is anxious for confirmation that this sort of hyper-anal approach yields results. Pixar’s latest film INSIDE OUT has been in development for six years. Think about what you were doing six years ago. Unless you’re a medical student or an anchorite, chances are you’ve done a lot of different things in six years. Pete Docter hasn’t. He has spent all of those six years making just one thing really, really good. And it is, thank God.
The requisite Pixar opening short is a twee tale of volcanic romance based on a slightly weak lava/love pun, accompanied by a song on the ukulele that has been plinky-plonking away in my head ever since. C+. Then the film proper kicks off, and succeeds at the unenviable task of dispatching some quite technical exposition about the mechanics of the film at a pace brisk enough to stop you sliding into gloss-eyed vacancy. In brief: plucky 12 year old Riley experiences an existential crisis when her family move from wholegrain Minnesota to a new house in the terrible vegan badlands of San Francisco, and the film charts her psychological turmoil through the misadventures of her emotions, personified as little figures living in the physicalised landscape of her mind. Spot the Dog this ain’t.
It’s a shame that they decided to use the family dinner scene for the trailer, because it’s probably the least original and charming section of the film, relying on cheap, overused Men are from Mars type gags. On the whole, INSIDE OUT avoids cliché admirably, and conveys abstract emotional concepts with a light touch. All cruft has been excised from the script; everything is either a joke (and a funny one) or it’s a well-integrated plot device for use later on in the film, and more often than not it’s both. The interplay between the inner world of Riley’s psychology and the outer world of her life with her parents is also handled deftly; neither feels like a disappointing break from the other. And it looks gorgeous. Through some sort of 3-for-2 deal on dimensions at the cinema I went to, it was perversely cheaper to see the film in eye-gnawing 3D, but this turned out to be a rewarding accident. Time has been put into rendering the interior of Riley’s mind as expansively as possible, which is nice to look at when the near-infinite recesses of her cognitive terrain really do appear to recede from you.
Being Pixar, they get their pick of more or less whoever they want in the way of voice actors, and they picked well. Amy Poehler and Phyllis Smith are perfectly antithetical as Joy and Sadness, and Richard Kind’s loveable tones make even the potentially grating imaginary friend character Bing Bong delightful. I’ve since read that Kind was actually crying when he delivered one of the film’s most heart-wrenching lines, and at times watching this did feel a bit like being punched in the soul in the way Pixar have such a knack for. In fact, it was so moving that I started to wonder how much fun this film really is for children. I heard several blubbing infants in my vicinity at key moments of sentiment, and a friend reported to me that a five year old of her acquaintance had spent the whole 90 minutes squeezing his mother’s hand and saying he didn’t like how it made him feel. For a U-rated film, INSIDE OUT says some quite sobering things about the pain of growing up, and even veers thrillingly close to being about straight up depression. I defy any adult to see it and not do some serious navel-gazing about their own psychology, let alone a child. But, on balance, I imagine the film encourages self-reflection of a positive kind, and of a kind that children are probably not prompted to do enough by, say, MINIONS. INSIDE OUT could easily have been a clumsy hash at a convoluted, smart-arsed idea. But not with Pixar behind the wheel. Good old Pixar. Well done you.
Imogen West-Knights 