Last night I went to go see the latest Pixar movie, Inside Out. I had heard some good things about it before going in and that was partly the reason I went to go see it on its opening weekend. After coming out, I wanted to sit down and write down a few of my thoughts. I am short on time and energy so here are some jotted down thoughts. The first part of this post is going to be spoiler-free. The second part of the post is going to be more spoilery.

1) You are going to see this movie with a lot of kids …

I stood with my friend amidst what had to be dozens upon dozens of loud, shouting kids. Then when I sat in the movie theatre, the kids were jumping everywhere, reacting to the screen, and sometimes they cried at the top of their lungs. Despite all of that, when the movie actually started they were captivated.

2) Pixar made two movies in one.

Even though the kids shut up once the movie started and did not start up again while it was playing, I am pretty sure that they did not get any of the deeper nuances of the movie including its various little callbacks and subtle references to actual neurology. Pixar is well known for creating movies that work on many different levels - but this one particularly stands out. This movie feels more to me an adult movie that is going to fly over the kids’ heads. The kids are going to love the cute and shiny visuals. They are going to love the intense action scenes. But as an adult, you are going to get your jaw dropped by the concepts BEHIND those scenes. Sort of like in Inception, the movie bases its concepts on known capabilities of the human mind. And some of the terms that they throw out there are stupendously bold.

The previous couple original Pixar movies played more to the kids side of the audience than the adults. I found Brave to be a pretty standard mother-and-daughter story. The first 5 minutes of Up always makes me cry - automatic - but the rest of the movie (up until the end, that is when I start crying again) is a standard action chase flick. This is the first standalone Pixar movie since Ratatouille that I found to be an adult movie set in an animated fantasy world.

Speaking of original, standalone Pixar movies …

3) One original movie in six years is way too long …

Pixar made Up in 2009. Since then they made Toy Story 3, Cars 2, Brave, and then Monsters University. By then they finally made Inside Out. So that was 6 years with just 1 original flick. And I know that Toy Story 3 made mad money (5th highest grossing movie at one time and now 15th with $1B), but 6 years is a long ass time. Compare it to 2001, when they got out Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, Wall-E, and then Up. Huge line of original creative. Then after that comes the sequels. And Brave was not that great either. Luckily Inside Out wasn’t.

Okay I have wasted enough time writing about non spoilery stuff. Let’s talk spoiler.

Spoilery stuff

4) The movie does a fantastic job of making exposition fun

Inception had a nice, punishingly unfun way of teaching us about the “rules of the universe.” It had us go through a mind heist the way that it was supposed to work. The same goes for Inside Out. The movie spends about the first 10 minutes explaining to us how Riley’s mind works.

5) I loved that everyone else has their own set of 5 emotions.

This is revealed in the trailer, but I really didn’t catch onto it until I saw the movie. In the movie’s universe, the same five emotions are in every person’s “mind headquarters.”

(The trivia notes that the writers and director originally had about 27 different emotions but settled on five. The ones that got cut were things like Surprise, Pride and Trust. Thank God Riley is a little 11 year old girl because what the hell would Lust look like in our mindquarters?)

At the end of the movie when all the serious stuff is resolved, the movie then takes us into the minds of various other people/animals. My personal favorite is when Riley knocks into a boy and inside his head there is simple utter chaos with everyone running around screaming and the alarms are screaming GIRL GIRL GIRL! (So true.)

6) The adults in Inside Out are less emotionally rocky than the kids.

Staying far, far away from the fact that Lust would exist in the head of a mid-30s house mom (and very very much certainly in the head of a 30s house dad), I note that in the trailer scene above depicting the mom’s mindquarters, the same five emotions … but why is Sadness (the blue one) placed front and center? When you look at the dad, the guy at the center console is Anger, the red guy.

Does this imply that the mom and dad’s default positions throughout the day are to be sad and angry? I thought about it for a while and decided that the movie’s presentation does not support that. Riley’s five emotions have very well developed individual characteristics, but those of her parents are relatively uniform. For the most part they seem to be in harmony about what to do and what they think. When Riley’s dad decides to put the foot down, two emotions have to put keys into the console - a joke that references nuclear warfare but at the same time points out that his five emotions work together well. Riley in contrast, when one emotion dominates her behavior, he/she stands at the console alone.

Perhaps the movie is showing us that being an adult means being capable of controlling our five emotions and having them work together towards an objective. While we may have a predilection towards one particular emotion (the mom towards sadness and the dad towards anger - also what sort of gender statement is this movie trying to make too?!), they learn to work together and not allow themselves to go wild at the console.

This follows into my next thought.

7) Inside Out teaches us about balance.

My friend Jenny says that Inside Out is a very Buddhist movie. I am not sure I am 100% with her on that statement - wouldn’t the Buddhist mind essentially have nobody at all hanging out at mindquarters? - but I would advance the thought that it is of a more Eastern philosophy, one that reminds me of Taoism.

The movie’s conflict happens because Riley is expected to be happy and joyful all the time. Within her mind, she has a predilection towards joy but Joy the Emotion is outgoing, optimistic, and always wanting to be able to fix things. She attempts to fix an encroaching sadness (which she thinks is “tainting” Riley’s otherwise happy core memories) by always avoiding the Sadness character. The movie’s events make it clear that this is not a workable situation. Joy fails to achieve her goals without Sadness and this is represented in a very physical way through teamwork.

The physical way in this is depicted is great, but it also let me spend time thinking about the place that sadness has within our lives. I would not be the first person to note that we are a society and culture that tries - just like Joy did - to push Sadness and other negative emotions out of our public-facing personas. Instagram is a place for happy emotions, photographs literally forced through a filter to be made artificially happy. Pinterest is a place for beautiful things and nothing else.

I think one of the best lessons I learned from Taoism (or what I think I learned, I have no idea if this is actually what the damn philosophy says) is that there is no inherent “good” or “bad” about the black or white in the Taoist symbol (the super famous yin yang you see).

One needs to be for both of them to exist. Two things that seem apparently at odds with each other - Joy and Sadness - are actually complementary and interconnected. The result is then larger than the sum of their parts.

8) Inside Out teaches that developing is about letting go

One concept introduced in the movie is that of “Islands”. Each island is built by a core memory within Riley - she has a goofy island that is built from her core memories of being a silly toddler and she has a “friendship island” that is built from her early memories of being with her first childhood friend. These islands by the conceit of the movie are part of what makes her personality.

The main conflict within the movie is that the core memories are dislodged from headquarters. Without them, the “islands” start to collapse. For example, Riley is Skyping with her old childhood friend - the one she left behind in Minnesota - and the friend notes that she met someone new and cool. Inside her head, Riley’s “friendship island” starts to wobble and collapse. It smashes apart. The interesting to note is that the end of the movie, this island is never brought back the way it did before. Neither is the “goofy toddler island” that was the first to collapse earlier in the movie. Instead, there are entirely new islands there built from brand new core memories.

I love that the movie does not cheat us by bringing back the islands that collapsed. They are gone, no longer part of our personality - but the movie is okay with that. We move on from our behavior, our hobbies/interests, and yes our friends too all the time. But at the same time, we have new behaviors, hobbies/interests, and friends that help shape and carve who we are right now at this very moment.

9) Inside Out says growing up is never just happy but never just sad.

Building off the previous statement of ambiguity and the allowance of multiple feelings to exist within us, one thing I definitely enjoyed about Riley’s growth is that the movie very physically demonstrates her growth and advancement at the end of the movie with colors. Joyful memories are yellow. Sad memories are blue. When she is 5/6/7, her memories are simply one monochrome. They are yellow - ebullient joy. Or they are somber blue - total sadness. Joy reflects this feeling at the beginning of the movie in keeping Sadness from “tainting” the otherwise yellow memories. She eventually lets go of this insecurity when she - and the rest of us in the audience - accepts that we must allow sadness to happen to us. This results in the creation of a new core memory, that of the entire family crying on the floor of their homes, homesick but glad to be together.

Yes, this core memory is blue, but the one thing that I loved is that it does not totally become so. Instead, the memory stays half-yellow, half-blue. It is literally bittersweet - the sort of complex, mixed abstraction that kids don’t have but adults do. Being able to appreciate that the experiences in our lives can be both happy and sad is part of growing up. I loved that Inside Out gives that to us wrapped up in such an elegant visual metaphor.

10) Inside Out makes a subtle point about what depression feels like

The best book I ever read about depression was the Noonday Demon. I kept many things from that book, but the one that I most took with me was the concept that depression does not really feel like an overwhelming sadness. It is more often personified as the inability to do anything. You feel frozen, confused and unable to really address your problems. Some have said that it feels like “nothing” - the inability to rouse up emotions for anything.

Inside Out’s visual metaphor for how that manifests in Riley is that once Joy and Sadness are ejected from mindquarters, there is nobody left in HQ to really be able to control her. Her mind becomes empty of the memories that make up who she is/her personality. The depressed person feels more like a husk of themselves than an actual human being, a person lacking what makes them them.

11) Riley should be goddamn ecstatic that her parents could afford such an awesome SF house

That house looks shitty but has to have cost in the upper $2M range.

Should we be worrying about Pixar?

Like I wrote above, six years is a long ass time to have just 1 standalone story. It was enough time for people to start wondering what the hell was happening to them. In addition, they took the entirety of 2014 off (though they are going to make up for it by bringing the Good Dinosaur in Nov 2015, the first time they have two Pixar movies in a single year). In a film portfolio that also includes Star Wars and the Marvel universe, it is easy to start to question what the hell is going on with Pixar. The way that Pixar made movies had started to seem sort of antiquated. Frozen was a huge ass hit that made more green than any Pixar movie and Big Hero Six was not bad either so even Disney’s old animation studios were starting to get good. When John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, the chief Pixar guys went upstairs to work on those studios, you start to wonder if Pixar even matters even more. They do not have the built-in marketing heft that the Marvel universe has, and their standalone story nature means that they have to invest and reinvest huge amounts of marketing dollars into their stories. Sequels work because they build off previous marketing investments made with earlier creative. Pixar is working off an old template, and I am not sure for how much longer it can do that. (Yes I know that there is the fan theory of the “Pixar Universe” but it has nothing close to what Marvel or even Star Wars has)

Inside Out I think staves off those questions for a while. The movie is a relative box office hit (though it falls short still of Jurassic World). It took 6 years to get made, but I loved this movie more than any of the sequels that came in between. I am excited that we then we get the Good Dinosaur in a few months, but I have heard ominous rumblings about that movie. The Wikipedia notes that the movie had the director replaced because he was not able to crack the third act. They completely redid the entire movie including plot points and even recast a large number of the people in it. That must have cost an IMMENSE amount of money. There have been good movies that came out of retoolings like this one (Ratatouille is one for example) but I await November with trepidation. It has a lot of to live up to.