The precursor to the movie Inside Out, as any 1980s reader of the Beano will know, was a comic strip called the Numskulls, in which a group of tiny operatives ran around inside a boy’s brain, pulling the levers that governed his five senses, with hilarious results. In the Pixar/Disney version, the jokes are more sophisticated and the brain workers hung up on more existential concerns, but the idea is roughly the same: a portrait of the inside of 11-year-old Riley’s mind, where central command is run by five warring emotions – Amy Poehler as Joy, Lewis Black as Anger, Mindy Kaling as Disgust, Bill Hader as Fear and Phyllis Smith as Sadness.
Sadness is fat, with large glasses and an unfortunate rollneck sweater, and every memory she touches turns blue and is ruined. That’s how Joy sees it, and the film revolves around her pneumatic efforts to eclipse Sadness and the other negative characters from Riley’s emotional range.
Richard Brody, writing in the New Yorker, took issue with this as “a deformation of children and of mental life”, in which the primal urgency of being alive is replaced by varieties of cuteness and whimsy. I didn’t mind that so much and, anyway, it isn’t entirely fair. Inside Out is about the structural function of sadness, which in the annals of Hollywood movies doesn’t make it a cop-out. Neither do jokes about abstract thought and the place occupied by children’s party entertainers in the darkest reaches of the subconscious. The visuals are highly inventive, representing memory as a vast archive through which cleaners make occasional sweeps, chucking out names of US presidents and everything Riley ever learned on the piano. It is also very funny.
A clinical psychologist writing in Slate thought the movie pretty accurate – “the importance of emotional congruence for optimal mental health”. But I liked it for the fact that for all the appeal of Poehler, her character was like a bone-headed motivational speaker, and speccy, moany, introspective Sadness was permitted to save the day.
-
Inside Out is on general release on 24 July.
