INSIDE OUT

Inside Out did two wonderful things. First, it fully restored faith in Pixar animation at a time when critics and fans alike worried it was starting to collapse under its own weight with Cars 2 and Brave. Monsters University pointed the arrow back up and Inside Out cleared all doubt that the studio’s brilliance would not wane. Second, its further evidence that animation is worthy of profound emotion seldom granted to it outside of Japan. Western cartoons having been working toward such recognition as early as the death of Bambi’s mother but Inside Out gets there in uniquely subtle ways; playing (fittingly in a movie about emotions) on the psyche we as humans recognize. 

            John Lasseter, who stepped back from production for the first time in his Pixar career to revitalize Disney’s struggling animation department, put his faith in Pete Docter, the talented director behind Up.

            “We knew from the first pitch of this idea that it had the potential to be really special, but in the same breath we knew it would be really hard,” he said. “It turned out to be one of the most difficult films we’ve ever made.”

            But, Lasseter’s confidence was matched by Pixar President Ed Catmull, “Pete has always had an intense focus on emotions, and the ability to convey those emotions to those he works with and to the audience,” he said.

            In concept, Inside Out may sound like a new frontier, but cartoons have a long history of listening to inner voices. Sometimes they are physical outside forces like Jiminy Cricket, sometimes they are spirits like the tiny wolf representing a dog’s wild instinct in Primitive Pluto. Most of they are smaller versions of themselves such as the duck psychologist in Spare the Rod and the canine angel and devil fighting for Pluto’s soul in Mickey’s Elephant (only the devil appears here) and then in Lend a Paw, a similar gag repeated with a feline devil in the Tom & Jerry short Sufferin’ Cats. Only on one occasion were they the same size as their protégée; in 1938’s Donald’s Better Self.

            There has been hardly any digging, however, into our core emotions. Disney scratched the surface with 1943’s Reason and Emotion and decades later (in a less abstract form) with the What Should I Do series, but Inside Out had an idea that was both creative and challenging, making stars out of the facets of our personality. It was obviously an extremely hard concept to pull off at all, let alone so successfully. Indeed, the script went through several drafts and a whole rough cut of the film was discarded when it failed to make an impact. Docter, who also wrote the film with Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley, had just about given up on the project, a hard decision given his successful run with Pixar and his personal connect to Inside Out having experienced being both the new kid in a new land when his family moved to Denmark in his youth and then a father to a young girl, until his very crisis awoke him to the point of the film. We need our fears, disappointments, and sadness to appreciate joy when it comes.

            “At that moment, I realized that Sadness was the key. We were trying to push her to the side. But she needed to be the one going on the journey. Joy needed to understand that it’s O.K. for Sadness to be included at the controls once in a while. It’s only the interaction and complexity of all of these emotions that brings a real connection between people.”

            Judging from his previous work at Pixar, especially Up, Docter was a safe bet as an animator capable of infusing real human emotion in cartoons. He had plenty of real-world experience after all.

            “It’s based on a strong emotional experience I had watching my daughter grow up. There is something that is lost when you grow up,” he said, then adding. “I thought I was making a film about my daughter, but the truth is, I’m more making a film about myself in relation to my daughter and understanding that. The film is told from a parent’s point of view, and being a parent, I just sort of slipped into that, I guess. It’s definitely made me think again about the way I grew up, my adolescence, and even on a day-to-day basis what I’m doing and why.”

            Tellingly, Docter gives ample strength to the characterization of Riley’s parents in the movie, making them more understanding than parents typically are in movies about childhood tribulations.

            “These guys are the pillars on both sides,” Docter explained. “They are pivotal parts, knowing how joyful this kid Riley used to be and the young woman she's changing into.”

            Then again, Inside Out may have started out as a film about a little girl, but evolved into something different as Docter observed.

            “"I started out doing a film about growing up, but it turned out it's a film about me watching my kids grow up. These parents are realizing that their kid is changing. That's difficult. But it is a part of life.”

            In an amusing twist, the parents are also granted their own team of emotions that, in the classic cartoon tradition, resemble them in some way.

            “There's our world which we're conscientious of and looking at. So we're driving, eating dinner, whatever. And inside our head there's this whole rich internal dialogue and world no one else knows about. This film gets you inside each character's heads,” Docter said. “We're intercutting to show what's going on inside each of their heads behind the scenes. What seems like a simple family dinner is actually fraught with all sorts of emotional angst and drama.”

            Ultimately, though, Docter, who describes himself as shy, used his own youth and his family’s move to a new country as a source.

            “That was the most difficult time of my life,” he said. “Suddenly, bam, your idyllic boyhood bubble is popped, and you’re aware that everything you do and everything you wear and everything you say is being judged by everyone else.”

            Joy and Sadness are the two main competing emotions in Inside Out, but the movie features five moods running the mind of an 11-year old named Riley. Joy (Amy Poehler) is the star because she is everyone’s favorite emotion and the only one we think we need. Her counterpart is Sadness (Phyllis Smith) a glum blue sprite. In the background there are Fear (Bill Hader), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Anger (Lewis Black), who seems destined to be the ensemble dark horse. 

            There is more to these characters than the emotion they represent and their own feelings often overlaps (Anger is often happy, Joy becomes disgusted with sadness, etc.) and while they certainly manipulate Riley’s impulses, she has plenty of control herself and can react independently. This, however, was the point that stumped cartoon historian Michael Barrier who wrote of the philosophical implications of the film on his website.

            “I couldn't get past the film's governing conceit, that the personified emotions inside eleven-year-old Riley's head were somehow distinct from Riley herself,” he wrote. “Who, or what, is Riley, if the emotions governing her life are not central to her being? To descend to a lower metaphysical plane, or maybe just call the story's craftsmanship into question, it seems to me that Inside Out's personified emotions, to be credible as such, would have to be one-dimensional—that is, nothing but fearful or angry or whatever—whereas most of them are not. Joy is so much more than joyful, especially as voiced by Amy Poehler, that she's really the story's protagonist, with a much broader emotional range than Riley herself.”

            It is true that the emotions have some control over Riley, but the girl is not their puppet. Her emotions work more like triggers, but the way she reacts to the trigger is spontaneous.

 For his part, Docter seemed pretty open in his interpretation, saying, “Riley’s emotions affect how she acts and what decision she makes, and vice-versa. This was the tough part: how do we craft the world in such a way that the decisions Riley makes affect the landscape down there? Because, most of the time, she’s walking around completely unaware of what Riley is doing up there. (I say “up there”; I guess “out there” is probably more appropriate.)

So, through a lot of trial and error, we came up with this idea of the personality islands. When Riley rejects certain aspects of her personality, they crumble. There’s one scene where Joy barely makes it off Goofball Island, and we just cut to flashes of this little kid turning around in circles with chocolate on her face, making faces. I remember my kids, at that age, and that’s really what this movie is talking about: the loss of that. You’re never going to get that back. That’s really, profoundly sad, but necessary and beautiful at the same time.

I thought, 'Okay, this is going to be about the kid, but she’s kind of the setting,' because I’m much more interested in the mind world — why songs get stuck in our head, or why I can’t remember that guy's name. Those kind of things that we all grapple with, and we get to explain it, put physical reality to it. It’s at once foreign to people and utterly familiar.

To some degree, I think we mix metaphors a bit. I don’t know if 'the subconscious' belongs in the same space as 'long-term memory,' because one’s sort of a Jungian vs. Freudian thing… Anyway, I don’t really know enough to speak accurately. We’re ultimately going for entertainment value — whatever works.”

Producer Joans River, however, remembers some difficulty with the character of Joy. “On the inside, it was the struggle with Joy as a character – that was really mysterious and elusive,” he said. “Her name is Joy, so she's got to be happy. But two things started to happen – one was that we had this character named Riley, who if she's being steered by Joy and we steer her into some kind of social storm, either you're not going to like Joy or she's going to be too sweet and saccharine and you won't like her. So those two things were tremendously hard  to harmonize and it took a lot of changes and moves and screenings to try and find the right tone. It was a combination of external stakes, the big move, and Joy's optimism and how she was going to handle it, and Amy Poehler being cast a year before the movie was finished -- which helped us thread that needle of likability to antagonism.”

            In themselves the emotions are ingenious creations and a triumph of Pixar’s imagination. Each is color-coded to their namesake. Disney has a rich history of representing moods through colors, one of the most vivid examples being the 1948 feature Melody Time, most notably in the “Once Upon a Wintertime” segment where flashing red is used to signify anger and then the “Blame it on the Samba” number in which Donald Duck and Jose Carioca walk in sadness, the color blue spread throughout the scene to match their downbeat disposition. Walt Disney was open about his love for the technique when he introduced color in his pioneering television series. Inside Out is the best use computer animation has ever made of this great tradition.

            The vocal talents are nothing short of perfect. There was no one better suited to the five figures than Poehler, Black, Hader, or Kaling, but it’s an ironic delight that the most enjoyable of all is Phyllis Smith as Sadness, who succeeds at the thankless job of making smile even in her gloomiest of moods. It especially amusing to see her unintentionally clash with Joy who is desperate to monopolize Riley’s mind.

            On first draft, the movie was slated to pit Joy against Fear. Sadness, however, proved to be not only the perfect counterpart for Joy but also her enabler. Docter explained, “Because Joy had been paired with Fear, if Joy learns from Fear, we’ve got to go back up there and do what? Fear is not an integral part of that. So we went back and re-paired Joy with Sadness, which is what Riley needs at the end. It made so much more sense, because it’s something that we, as humans, don’t want.

It was tricky, because for the emotions to be in charge we can’t have her be in physical peril. If she’s getting kidnapped or lost or something, the emotions aren’t going to be able to help her. So we had to come up with something where emotions and coming clean about how you really feel is the key to this. Again, to me, it’s also about the relationships. Basically, Riley, with the difficulty that her dad’s having in setting up his business, is trying to be helpful and be happy. But that is actually the exact wrong thing for her. Sadness is the answer to that. She needs to just express her feelings of loss for what she’s gone through.”

            Inside Out, then, becomes a struggle between Joy and Sadness to take over Riley’s mood. Riley, meanwhile, is facing the biggest fear an eleven-year old can face; moving to a new town away from friends and into a new school. It’s easy to see why Joy thinks she should take control of Riley at such a time. Sadness, however, thinks there’s a need for her as well. The movie is vague about her intentions and the degree to which Sadness knows what she is doing, but her involvement taints Riley’s happy memories, something that only becomes a crisis when her core memories, the ones the fuel her personality islands (Family, Friendship, Goofball, and Hockey), become affected. In a tussle, Joy and Sadness get sucked out of Headquarters and into the winding maze that is the young girl’s mind. From here the outline of the movie becomes a familiar road picture with two mismatched companions learning to appreciate each other on the way back home. The difference here is that the companions are two of our primary emotions, and what they learn about each other has a lot to say about ourselves. Joy for one learns that she cannot exist without Sadness for, without Sadness, what does she have to respond to?

            Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at University of California Berkeley brought in by Docter as a consultant, explained the phenomena, “We know scientifically that a girl Riley's age is going to lose a lot of joy. They're going to feel sad, and they're going to really lose a sense of self confidence; they have this drop in self-esteem. Parents, when they see it, are absolutely shell shocked. And then sometimes people are saying, "Maybe you should put her on medication." But what the film says is this is just part of growing and it's OK. I feel that is the most important message in the movie.

One of the things I really resonated with is that we have a naive view in the West that happiness is all about the positive stuff. But happiness in a meaningful life is really about the full array of emotions, and finding them in the right place. I think that is a subtext of the movie: The parents want Riley to just be their happy little girl. And she can't. She has to have this full complement of emotions to develop. I think we all need to remember that. This is a weakness in Western culture and the United States. You need sadness, you need anger, you need fear.”

            This echoed Docter’s own discovery that, “In modern day U.S., we associate sadness with negativity. We try to avoid it, we even self-medicate. But really sadness is a response to loss. It forces you to slow down and reboot. When you see someone crying, it's a signal to other people. I realized that Joy needed to let Sadness forward."

            Almost from its formation, Pixar took the animated background to a whole new plain, but Inside Out offers its most creative landscaping job yet. Beyond Headquarters, Riley’s mind is a wondrous playground of memories, dreams, ideas, and decisions. Distant memories are stored in a library of the subconscious. Memories that are no longer necessary are periodically purged from the library and subsequently dumped into a pit of forgotten memories.

            For the most part, the layout is bright and colorful, but the marvel lies in the design of the place. The fields of the mind provide a sprawling playground for the cartoonist’s imagination filled with visual puns and thrills; the train of thought is exactly that for instance.

            Rivera recounted the fun the team had designing the layout, “When you start developing this movie, there's no point of reference. Everything was based on what Pete wanted it to feel like, which is very tricky when you've got a crew that has to turn that into models and objects and sets and characters. So the world became this exercise in – what does this story need? So then we would design Headquarters. We knew we needed someplace where they worked. But what does the world look like? How big is it? What are they trying to get back to? What is the geography of it?

As the story kept developing, Pete's big discovery was what's at stake. That's what we always ask ourselves with these movies: What's at stake? This was a little harder to find. Was Riley at stake? Is she going to die? That doesn't really work. But what we came upon was her personality, who she is. That started to inform the world and what it needs represent. That's where the islands came from – they were things that you could see that are physical as well as visual. So what was happening to Riley on the outside of the storytelling was predicating the world and what we needed and how it could geographically function.”

There is also a brief fun scene in which the travelers gets caught in the abstract thinking department where their shapes are shifted, redesigned, blurred, and even altered in texture in a style reminiscent of Chuck Jones’s work in the 60s and 70s. Indeed, the movie was said to be designed in the style of animation from the late golden age. But it has its own feel and any tribute is more of a spiritual nature than an emulation.

            Everything has its proper place in Riley’s mind as, indeed, should be the case in any healthy mind. Not surprisingly, a relic from her childhood years has made the halls of the subconscious his home. He’s a fuzzy pink creature with an elephant trunk and cat whiskers named Bing Bong and shared many happy moments with Riley when he served as her imaginary friend. Now he’s been relegated to the distant memories where he hopes for a comeback. 

            According to Docter, Bing Bong was left out of publicity material for the film because, “In terms of simplicity and pitching the movie, if you have Anger, Fear, Sadness, Joy, Disgust, and Bing Bong, then you’re kind of scratching your head, going ‘Which emotion is he? It kind of muddied the sell, if you will. It was just a way of keeping things simple, and keeping things on the concept, and then allowing people to have the surprise along the way.”

            Be that as it may, Bing Bong becomes the great surprise of Inside Out. In sheer creative terms, he is a marvel to behold. Voiced by Pixar regular Richard Kind in a way that recalls Dom Deluise’s vocal work for Don Bluth, the discarded phantom is a classic tragic-comic figure, wandering the mind in a tramp’s outfit aware that his glory days have passed. He knows chances for a comeback are slim and yet it’s Bing Bong that really marks the film’s teaching moment. Letting go of things is sometimes the only way of moving forward, however painful it may be. Bing Bong once filled a void in Riley’s development and, though reluctant to realize that gap has been replaced, he grows to accept that he no longer has a place in the mind of the grown girl Riley has become.

            Moments are a welcome introduction to real-world grief for animated films, something Pixar has pioneered. Editor Kevin Nolting gave an insight into how they work.

            “I think the secret is the combination of Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen” he said. “Pete has the initial idea, and then he lets Ronny run with it and something magical happens. Also Pete isn’t afraid to go there; he’ll let us go too far and then we dial it back. He’s very conscious about being too sappy, and he has a good sense of that. We can’t just add a sad beat because we need a sad beat in the movie. We spend a lot of time making sure we can get to that sad beat, that the audience is ready and that we’re not forcing it on the audience. The character arc has to take you there.”

            Beyond the layout of the mind, Inside Out paints an interesting depiction of San Francisco, the city which becomes Riley’s new home. The first thing that catches the eyes is the remarkable detail in the depiction of the city’s old buildings, unique in a city that, due to constant threats from natural disasters, consistently remodels its infrastructure.  In an unusual turn for a city that’s so heavily romanticized, Inside Out manifests a covert contempt for the city, mocking everything from the hipster culture that has taken over the hippie culture to its obsession with health cuisine (“Congratulations San Francisco, you’ve ruined pizza!,” yells Anger during a visit to an organic pizzeria).

Riley does, however, grow to accept the city as a new part of her life, even granting it a place in her revamped Family island as evident by the appearance of a model of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s no Minnesota, the film reassures when even her parents admit to missing the tranquility of the Midwest, but home is where the family is.

Inside Out is further proof of what Japan has known for a long time. Animation can be as thoughtful and powerful as any film when allowed to be so. Indeed, it takes an older more mature person to feel the impact of Inside Out who has experienced the terror of being a new kid in town. It was one of the best films of 2015. What further proof is needed?