Movie: Inside Out

Inside Out:  another astonishingly complex, enjoyable hit from Pixar.  The basic story line is simple: Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), an 11 year old girl, has to move with her parents from Minnesota, where she has enjoyed her life and her friends and ice hockey, to San Francisco, which causes much stress.  The complexity of this animated film and the reason it works for both adults and children lies in its visual explanations about what is happening in Riley’s brain.  The emotions that are given physicality are fear, anger, disgust, sadness and joy, and each emotion has a different body and voice.  The good news is that Joy is the controlling emotion, however, when Joy (Amy Poehler) is not in control of the thought process, bad things start to happen.  Anger provides many of the laugh lines for adults.  Lewis Black, one of my favorite comedians, is the perfect voice for Anger.  Another key emotion is Sadness and Phyllis Smith’s monotone fits perfectly.  Fear is voiced by Bill Hader and Mindy Kaling is Disgust.  All are superb.  A principal underlying theme is that as we grow up, our memories fade.  Some memories are core to who we are while others are easy to discard.  Certain of the memories are also given physical shape and a voice.  These seemingly “simple” ideas are the key to the movie and work to keep adults involved in the film.  When Riley gets sad, she starts losing memories.  Although Joy tries to retain the memories, the process becomes complex and Riley’s sad memories continue to multiply.  The San Francisco ice hockey scenes are both touching and illuminating.  Pete Docter wrote and directed this 102 minute delight.  The film deals with very abstract concepts, but by giving physicality and dialogue to the emotions, the result is a marvelous movie experience.  A nice added touch is showing that the emotional chaos  happening in a child’s brain also occurs in adults.  Wall-E had been my Pixar favorite but I now have a new favorite.  Inside Out is truly a movie for all ages.