Pixar has proven over the last decade that they can consistently deliver all-ages movies that are both popular and emotional. A major part of their power comes from Pixar’s mastery of the bittersweet. In their best moments, Pixar overloads its audience with powerful feelings both positive and negative, intertwined in a way that makes it difficult for the viewer to rationalize. In Up, we see the entirety of Carl and Ellie’s life together in a short montage, taking the viewer through a beautifully executed sequence of extreme highs and lows. In Toy Story 3 we watch Andy give away the toys that the series has focused on for all three films, a moment of loss, abandonment, and a new beginning rolled into one. Both moments require a herculean effort on the part of the viewer to hold back tears.
Given Pixar’s history and proven skill with mixing joy and sadness into potent cinematic moments, it makes perfect sense that their newest film, Inside Out, takes the concept of complex emotional entanglement and makes it the subject. The film attempts to tackle the psychological drives that power us all on a day-to-day basis. In addition to characters representing fear, anger, disgust, joy, and sadness, the movie also tackles the imaginary, our core values, abstract thought, the subconscious, dreams, and long-term memory.
It is shocking how complex this movie, purportedly for childen, can be at times. It would be too much if Inside Out were not crafted with such elegance, distilling these ideas into basic visual contexts that children (or at least pre-teens, like central human character Riley) can understand. As Riley gets older, the control panel operated by her emotions grows larger and more complicated to indicate her increasing emotional breadth. The core values are giant floating islands attached to the control center, the subconscious a dark and scary wasteland cut off from the rest of the mind. Long term memories sit in a giant database and are slowly thrown into a pit as they become less significant for the individual (this same pit is where the imaginary go after they stop being relevant). Abstract thought literally compresses its environment into abstract imagery, dreams are a movie studio where a cast recreates and manipulates daily events and fears, and the “core memories” which make up a person’s persona can be colored to match various different emotions.
This coloring of emotions is a major plot element and the primary “lesson” for children to learn from the movie. While Joy is initially scared of what Sadness might effect by touching Riley’s happy memories and turning them blue, we see firsthand the significance of sadness in our emotional spectrum. Showing sadness allows others to sympathize with us, to understand where we are mentally and support us in times of need. This is a more complicated purpose than fear and disgust, which essentially exist to keep us safe, and Pixar seems to know this.
They never outright explain Sadness’s purpose to the audience, they show it in the moments of person-to-person support and the swirling yellow-and-blue of the memories, sadness and joy. This brings us back to Pixar’s biggest strength: the bittersweet. Inside Out may be portrayed as an epic journey, with its two central emotions travelling through a vast and complicated environment to get home. But the real story, of a young girl coping with her emotions after her family moves, is entirely relatable and down-to-earth. At the end, when Riley is allowed to simply cry about her situation, remembering all sorts of moments both joyful and sad from her previous life in Minnesota, it hits the viewer just as hard as the most powerful moments in Pixar’s past films. Inside Out is easily one of the best studio films this year, and one that will be remembered as one of Pixar’s finest.