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Pixar Reminds Us It’s What’s Inside That Counts
Life in 2020 has certainly made most of the years prior look a whole lot better by comparison. And 2015, when Pixar released Inside Out, seems like an entirely different era of humanity. Thankfully the timelessness that is nearly any Pixar piece resonates well here so pausing from the contemporary catalog of streaming-only releases to take a look back for purpose of review seemed the right thing to do.
The bulk of Inside Out takes place literally inside the head of 11 year old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), who’s dealing with the throes of life in a new town, new school, no friends scenario as a result of her parents’ decision to move the family from Minnesota to San Francisco.
Riley’s emotions, like that of all living things, it’s later revealed, are determined by the interplay of five user-friendly tropes operating a control panel: Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Fear (Bill Hader), and Anger (Lewis Black). Before you find yourself wondering why things like regret, excitement, curiosity and the like are absent, I remind that this is Pixar; it’s okay to put your trust in their collective wisdom. Besides, it seems the remainder of the cast of The Office must have been too busy with prior obligations to fill such roles.
All fooling aside, the concept so far is somewhat unique, assuming of course the viewer is too young to remember the early 90s sitcom Herman’s Head but where things become unmistakably Pixar is the attention to detail given to the functions of the mind behind the leading cast of characters. Memories are constantly being made and stored to softball-like glass orbs that can be played at will like a Facebook gif. These can be tainted by emotion even after the fact before they become sorted to long term storage, core memories (the ones that mold who we are), become deleted etc. The thing about those core memories is they are actually used to power entire islands of our personalities – and there is one dedicated to friendship, another family, another our passions etc.
Memory orbs can also be recalled and played at will – a clever little twist explaining why songs like to get stuck in the ol noodle at seemingly random.
Anyway, the timing of all these changes in her life couldn’t be worse because, thanks to a control room malfunction, Joy and Sadness are sucked out of mission command and deposited much deeper into the psyche. Wandering through long term memory storage, they find themselves searching for a way back to headquarters amid places like the movie production company responsible for our dreams, the theme park that is the imagination, even a risky zone of abstract thought where the very rules of existence no longer apply.
The attention to detail and simple cleverness that so deftly cover the nuances are all here and, in a lot of ways, served to put Pixar back onto the path of excellence for once they were known. Hindsight grants a much clearer view of the patterns and it’s important to keep in mind that prior to Inside Out, the company found itself in a bit of a slump. The generally ill-received Cars 2 and Monsters University had been preceded by 2012’s well-intentioned but quickly-forgotten Brave. The last truly moving piece from them, to the general consensus at the time, had been 2009’s Up. It made sense then that they called upon Up’s writer/ director Pete Docter to make it happen once more with Inside Out.
Of course in the time since, Pixar has positively returned to form with films like Coco, Toy Story 4 and Onward; but there is little doubt that Inside Out did its part to pull the company out of the slump of conformity and back into the high water mark of the industry with risky/ thought provoking material as entertaining for children as it is adults as had been their early trademark.
The industry recognized it as something special, accordingly – as the film has been nominated for and won more industry awards and accolades than could possibly be included here, not the least of which involving having received fifteen Best Picture, twenty-one Best Original Screenplay, and forty Best Animated Feature nominations from over 50 different organizations and associations. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the 88th Academy Awards held in 2016.
Viewers, too, were quite happy. Inside Out grossed $356.8 million in North America and $501.1 million in other countries for a worldwide total of $858 million against its budget of $175 million, cementing it as the second highest grossing animated film of that year. However, before becoming too impressed with society’s collective recognition of the cleverness and intelligence that a film like Inside Out brings to the medium, do remember this; the number 1 spot by a huge margin that year went to Minions. Can’t win them all.