Inside Out (2015) - FrenchMan120

The new Pixar animation Inside Out could easily have been called Out There. It’s as bizarre, imaginative and authentically psychedelic as anything produced in mainstream animation. At this point in the fortunes of the once-infallible creative powerhouse, you wouldn’t have bet on Pixar coming up with anything very outré. Bought by Disney in 2006, the studio hadn’t produced anything truly inspired that wasn’t a sequel since Up in 2009. Given the humdrum quality of Cars 2 and Monsters University and 2012’s well-intentioned but forgettable Brave, it seemed as if the studio had lost its penchant for exotic risk.

But Inside Out is in the top rank of Pixar productions with its combination of audacity, intelligence, wit and emotional reward. Directed and co-written by Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc and Up) and co-directed by Ronnie del Carmen, Inside Out starts from a boldly abstract premise: the narrative plays out within the psyche of a girl named Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias) and the film’s characters are her feelings.

At the start, one of those feelings, Joy (Amy Poehler), asks: “Do you ever look at someone and wonder what is going on inside their head?” The next questions that arise are: what might such psychic events actually look like? And how might they generate a story that can be sustained for 102 minutes? Inside Out meets these challenges with an inventiveness that’s appropriately mind-boggling.

Formidably ingenious, Inside Out hits an elusive sweet spot in appealing to children and adults alike

The film starts in a dark cavern, the Plato’s cave of the unformed self. As baby Riley is born, Joy spontaneously appears – a shimmering, big-eyed Tinkerbell-like pixie – and observes Riley’s view of the world on a glowing, cloud-like surveillance screen. Joy is soon joined by other emotions – Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger, the latter characterised as a squat red sponge that bursts into flame when provoked. These five monitor Riley’s life and produce her responses by operating a console of levers and buttons, something between the USS Enterprise and PlayStation 4. Inside Out explores much the same premise – little people busy working in your head – as the Beano’s Numskulls strip, but it’s infinitely more sophisticated and distinctively female-skewed. The film’s real heroine is Joy, a pathologically upbeat micro-manager convinced that only positive feelings count – and Amy Poehler instils Joy with something of the obsessive girl guide eagerness of her Leslie Knope in the TV sitcom Parks and Recreation.