Directors: Pete Docter, Ronaldo Del Carmen
Score: 10/10
Please Do a Sequel Where You Try To Explain A First Crush, Please?
There’s a joke image going around the internet lately regarding Pixar’s brainstorming methods. It starts with PIxar posing the thought “What if toys had feelings” in 1995, and working their way through “What if bugs had feelings” and “What if monsters had feelings”, all the way through fish, superheros, cars, rats, robots, and so on. Well, we’ve finally come in the full-meta circle all the way to “What if feelings had feelings?”
At this point, it’s extremely tempting to point at the 94/100 metacritic score, say “It’s Pixar, how bad could it possibly be?” and knock off for dinner—but I’d like to think I’m a bit more professional than that. Honestly, though, there’s only so many words I can use to talk directly about the movie before I start treading water. Instead, I’d like to talk a little bit about animation.
There’s a certain sort of truth that I’ve started really noticing and putting a lot of thought into of late, and it’s the notion that animation will always be better than live action at evoking emotion and living deeply in your memories. Toy Story was TWENTY years ago, and most of us can still remember that movie, if not exactly when we first saw it and how we felt at the time. Can you remember a live-action movie from the same year? Did it make you feel anything like Toy Story did? I wasn’t even in middle school at the time, and that movie is still quite fresh in my mind, when I’ve forgotten most of the names of the people I knew back then.
That’s the power of animation, and that’s what Pixar has done a masterful job of grasping: animation is the stuff of emotions. Aspects of characters can be selectively diminished or enhanced with subtle graphical differences. The drawings become caricatures without being forced into cliche or stereotype. Everyone instinctively knows something about the character when you draw them as short and squat, or wispy beyond realism, or as an anthropomorphized object. It’s storytelling shorthand.
So why does Pixar seem to have this formula down to a science? Why do Disney/Pixar creations account for four of the only six movies I’ve ever cried at, or even come close to crying at? What do they know that the rest don’t?
Inside Out is a prime example of what makes Pixar great: every element serves to drive the story’s central idea. Their central writing tenants almost dictate it. Heck, look up their “22 Rules of Story” sometime—it’s almost my personal Bible for writing fiction. There’s no fat, no wasted energy on joke characters or throwaway “humor” in a misguided attempt to hold a child’s attention. That sort of audience-degrading thought is what drug down something like Frozen. Kids aren’t stupid. They have deep feelings that they can’t always put words to. Kids are complex, perhaps even more complex than adults are sometimes. Inside Out captures all of these truths and more. It handles something as utterly abstract and indescribable as depression, and never takes its audience for granted. It’s smart enough for the adults, and accessible enough for anyone.
Does it have the utter staying power of something like the original Toy Story or (one of my personal favorites) How to Train Your Dragon 2? I don’t know. I think that might rely more on where you are and how old you are when you see it. Personally, I don’t know if I’d promote Inside Out to my personal best-ever list, but by my own description of what the scores I give mean, there’s just nothing else to give it but a 10/10. I left the theater with all the feels, and I bet you might, too.
Acting: 10
Story: 9
Visuals: 9
Sound: 8
Enjoyment: 10
Overall Score: 10/10
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