The best compliment I can give Inside Out is that it would still be a great movie if you lopped half of it off. There’s a worthwhile story to be told about an eleven-year-old girl moving halfway across the country and struggling to adjust to her new environment. The emotional beats of Riley’s story — feeling the need to put on a happy face for the good of her parents, buckling under the pressure, and deciding to run away — are compelling and poignant all on their own.
Likewise, if Inside Out were just a wild romp through the mind of a child, it would still be uproarious and inventive from beginning to end. The movie works just as well as a buddy comedy, with Joy and Sadness traipsing through a colorful labyrinth, leaping over hurdles both literal and metaphorical, and eventually finding common ground. As I discussed on the We Love to Watch Podcast, you could take either of these tales, make it the whole movie, and still create something wonderful and stirring.
But the beauty of the film, and one of the things that makes it so special, is the way those two parts of its story work in tandem to produce something greater than either could on their own. Joy’s struggles mirror Riley’s and vice versa. The obstacles in the real world translate to obstacles in the mental one. And what affects one affects the other. There’s a stunning synergy at play, where each element of the movie is made better, more complete, and more unique, by being a piece of this greater whole.
That’s the glory of marrying the two tales together. One features a personified emotion, straining to keep a positive attitude, while trying to restore a batch of core memories and make her way through a dizzying unknown place. The other’s a young girl, straining to keep a positive attitude, while trying to find a new sense of belonging and make her way through a dizzying unknown place. Joy’s story may take place amid the inner workings of a child’s brain, while Riley’s takes place in modern day San Francisco. But the two mirror one another beautifully and, somehow, it’s up for debate which locale is scarier and more bewildering.
Riley should just be glad she didn't run into the Tanner family.
Even more impressive is how seamless Inside Out makes this seem. Not a single moment feels stale, extraneous to the story or characters, or otherwise incapable of provoking an emotional response. That response could be delight at the wondrous worlds crafted by co-directors Pete Docter, Ronnie del Carmen, and Pixar’s peerless creative team; melancholy at the film’s many heart-rending moments; or laughter at its brilliant comic routines.
But by god, everything in the film not only works, but works in harmony with the whole. The movie can jump from Joy’s escapades, to Riley’s first day of school, to the rest of the gang’s antics back at headquarters without missing a beat or otherwise hampering the proceedings.
Part of that owes to the film’s brilliant structure and framing, but much of it owes to impeccable casting. Richard Kind nearly steals the show as Bing Bong, Riley’s goofy but heartfelt imaginary friend, whose tear-jerking sacrifice represents loss but also growth. In the same vein, young Kaitlyn Dias does a stellar job communicating the realness of what poor Riley is going through as part of this big transition.
And if that weren’t enough, I’m not sure there’s ever been a better match between performer and character than for the emotions that live inside Riley’s head. Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, and Bill Hader are, literally and figuratively: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear personified. The film’s humor, whether slapstick, situational, or downright absurd, soars with all these ringers aboard. Borrowing so heavily from the NBC comedy bench gives the film a chance to inject real character in moments big and small.
Getting a head start on NBC's reboot of Herman's Head.
But Poehler is the star here. As Parks and Recreation fans know, the actress is capable of switching from bubbly optimism to goofball comedy to heartstring-tugging pathos on a dime. Joy, ironically enough, provides Poehler with a vehicle to show her full range here, and her performance humanizes the little sprite’s can-do spirit as well as her blind spots. While backed by a flawless ensemble, Poehler anchors the film and does so with literal flying colors.
It’s easier to shine, though, with such a bright and imaginative world to explore. The inside of Riley’s mind provides Pixar’s dream-weavers an opportunity to go wild in visualizing the internal processes of the human brain. Interludes in a zone for abstract thought, a land of imagination, a movie studio that makes dreams, and a valley of subconscious nightmares allow the film’s creatives to let loose in conjuring up clever, amusing, and eye-catching representations of these mental functions. The sequences show off the studio’s aesthetic virtuosity in a space without any limitations.
That said, the set pieces don’t just exist for the sake of empty, albeit stunning, spectacle. Docter and fellow screenwriters Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley use the half-magical, half-factory space both to convey the inner workings behind Riley’s experiences and to set up the world and the rules that Joy and her fellow mind-workers live by. Each informs the journeys of the film’s two protagonists.
Details like an actual train of thought, the Memory Dump, the Mind Manuals, the control panel that dictates Riley’s actions, and the way her core memories connect with different personality islands, all create the backdrop, setups, and payoffs that power the film. These details matter to Joy’s efforts to escape from memory storage and return to headquarters. And they set the stage for her eventual epiphany on how to solve her problems and Riley’s problems at the same time.
At night, Goofball Island becomes Derry, Maine.
The synergy, however, goes both directions. Riley’s rough experiences in the real world tear those personality islands asunder and make it harder for Joy to make it back home. Meanwhile, a control panel operated without Joy or Sadness creates more of those experiences, in a feedback loop that threatens all of our heroes. The solution turns out to be the one thing both Joy and Riley have been trying to avoid, contain, and suppress this entire time — Sadness.
Sadness is what got Joy into this mess in the first place. She tried to prevent her melancholy colleague from affecting Riley’s core memories, an effort that left the pair sucked up and stranded. At every step along the way, Joy tries to hinder Sadness from interfering, poo poos her suggestions, and treats her as a burden rather than a resource.
And yet, over the course of their trip together, Joy sees the good that Sadness can do, in both practical and more metaphorical terms. After a setback, Bing Bong feels stymied and can’t muster the will to show his friends the way, until Sadness acknowledges his pain and shows him the empathy that helps him recover.
Later in the film, Joy and Sadness realize they have the same favorite memory of Riley. It’s from an event that included both of them in equal measure, where Riley loses a big game and feels the shame and difficulty of that, but after showing those tough emotions, found comfort from her parents and a rousing dose of celebration from her friends. It’s a testament to the film’s central thesis, on the necessity of those sorrow-filled sentiments, to where even Joy comes to understand their worth.
Just don't touch it at the same time as a Saudi king.
Joy’s realization mirrors the audience’s own deeper understanding of Sadness. Sadness starts out as a hindrance, an annoyance, a roadblock to taking both Riley and Joy where she needs to go. But slowly, over the course of the film — between her knowledge from the mind manuals and her understanding of what’s truly needed to be able to keep going — she proves herself an asset to reaching their goals. The audience sees her value at the same time Joy does, an impressive trick of synchronicity between viewer and protagonist, with both eventually realizing that sadness is, however unintuitively, a vital part of healing and happiness.
That is the cinch of Inside Out. Just as the two halves of the film — Riley in the real world and Joy in the mental one — would work well on their own but work spectacularly together, so too do Joy and Sadness go together and create beauty in unexpected ways. Joy realizes that allowing your unhappiness to show rather than bottling it up lets the people who care about you know that you need help, and that, in turn, gets you back to a place of warmth and jubilation.
Hurt is not the enemy of happiness; it’s a bridge to help you reach it. There’s something simple but bold in that acknowledgement — that negative emotions are not meant to be suppressed or shuffled off to the side, but embraced and processed as a necessary and vital part of becoming a fully-formed human.
It is, in fact, quietly revolutionary. There’s tough times all around at the moment. And there’s something powerful in telling the audience, children especially, that experiencing these more difficult emotions isn’t a bad thing. Instead, the message on display is that they’re a natural and necessary part of feeling better and, moreover, a way to tell the people who love you that you need help.
It’s telling that the true looming threat in Inside Out isn’t sadness or pain, but instead numbness. Riley’s hardships send her into a small depression, where her control panel grays out, leaving her incapable of feeling anything or reaching out for the help she needs.
All-Terrain Hugs
It takes both Joy and Sadness to overcome that, to work in concert to get back to headquarters and give Sadness the wheel to make Riley feel again. The feeling spurs Riley to be open with her parents, to speak earnestly about how much she misses her old home and how much she’s struggling in her new one. That, in turn, prompts expressions of sympathy, shared hardship, and ultimately solace from her parents, as they embrace their daughter and give her the comfort and support she’s needed this whole time.
From there, a miracle happens. To this point, all of Riley’s memories have been color-coded according to the emotion that generated them — entirely green, purple, or some other color to signify the sentiment attached. But this moment of great hurt followed by greater comfort and acceptance produces one that is swirled yellow and blue, representing the way this new core memory carries both joy and sadness at once, marking a turning point in Riley’s growing maturity and understanding. The complexity there, conveyed in simple terms, is masterful and profound.
It comes in the idea that those negative feelings are not meant to be compartmentalized, but rather embraced, to make us more complete and fulfilled human beings. The combination of joy and sadness isn’t bittersweetness. It is, instead, catharsis, the processing of our toughest moments through our acceptance of them, so that our loved ones know we’re hurting, so that we can deal with those complicated emotions that are not black and white, and so that we can experience the rich fullness of life in all its different hues and shades, rather than hobble ourselves in pursuit of happiness alone
Just as Joy and Riley’s stories are inextricable from one another and make Inside Out a better film for their combined hardships and glories, so too do joy and sadness work in concert with one another within ourselves, making us better and more satisfied people. That is the grand, animating inside of this near-perfect film — a cinematic achievement that mixes so many distinctive visions and imaginative adventures and real life difficulties together — and finds something beautiful and profound when it brings them together.
