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    Inside Out

    Reviewed by
    adamwatchesmovies@

    “Inside Out” fully deserves the mountain of praises that have been heaped onto it. It’s an imaginative, funny, original and gorgeous-looking film teeming with emotion... and I’m not just talking about the fact that our main characters are literally emotions. This CG animated film is about a young girl, Riley Anderson. After moving to a new city with her parents, her personality gets thrown completely out of whack and she struggles to adjust. That’s what’s going on outside. On the inside of her head we witness her five personified emotions: Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling) try to govern her through this difficult time. The problem is that both Joy and Sadness accidentally get themselves knocked out of the control room where they can govern Riley’s reactions and get lost in the halls of memories and subconscious. These two emotions have to get back to headquarters before Riley makes some terribly misguided, life-changing decisions.

    I know that premise is a bit tricky to wrap your head around, but think of it this way: this film’s conceit is that you are the one making all of the decisions, but your emotions tell you what your reactions to the world are and help you make all of those decisions. When you find a piece of gum under your shoe you could be disgusted by it, upset that something bad has happened, frightened that you’ll never be able to get it off of your shoe, angry at the person who carelessly dropped it on the sidewalk or amused at the fact that it used to be pink and now it’s all black and gross. Those are all plausible ways to react, but what if it was impossible for you to feel sadness, or joy? How screwed up would you be all of a sudden?

    In my boat that’s a pretty interesting premise, one that’s even more captivating when you apply it to a tricky time in a young person’s life. Not puberty (that would be too obvious), but that day when you move to a new home and you realize that all of your old hangouts are gone and all of your friends are now in a completely different city. I love this concept. I’m not opposed to sequels, reboots, remakes and prequels as long as they’re good, but when you get something so fresh and original that you can’t predict how it’s going to go it’s much more entertaining.

    What impressed me about this movie is that it feels like no stone has been left unturned in the making of it. While on their adventure into the mind of Riley, Joy and Sadness encounter all kinds of emotional or psychological concepts in incredibly varied ways. You really feel like this is a living, breathing world. It’s not just some story dressed up to be original by labelling the characters in some middle-of-the-road adventure random emotions and having them act sad or angry all the time. I almost wish there hadn’t been a big emotional crisis here because this world is so interesting I wanted to be able to see it fully-functioning. It’s that good.

    When I first heard about the film I was intrigued and I wondered how a story about 5 one-dimensional characters would handle. That’s the thing though; the emotions in this movie are not just about the emotion they represent. They have real personalities and are capable of changing within themselves, which makes sense because if I think back, the things that anger, disgust, sadden, fill me with dread or excite me are different now than when I was a little kid. I had avoided most of the trailers for this film because I hate getting plot points spoiled for me (thanks, “Terminator Genisys” for giving away big plot twists in your trailers by the way, that was reaaal good of you) but even if I had there is no way I could have been prepared for how deep this movie is. I didn’t expect to be moved as much as I was by this story.

    This is a movie that is going to have a lot of re-watch value. There is so much going on in this anthropomorphic interpretation of our self-conscious that you could just sit and study the way it interprets things, but you’d have a hard time because you would be constantly distracted by the story, the wide array of jokes and the poignant drama. I laughed hard and frequently during the running time of “Inside Out” and there were just as many times where I felt the little voices inside my head pushing all kinds of buttons and levers as I also felt sad, or angry, or afraid that something bad was going to happen to Riley. Pixar has delivered to us another animated film that has tremendous staying power because I think this movie will resonate very differently for different age groups. I wish I had seen this movie with some small children (instead of my grown up friends) just to hear what they thought of the interpretation of human psychology here. I think that adults will like it just as much, if not more than children and that’s a quality that all films written for kids should strive for. This movie is fully aware that kids are capable of digesting smart material and will appreciate being treated like an intelligent audience instead of one that is satisfied with colourful stuff simply bouncing around meaninglessly for an hour and a half.

    I don’t like calling movies “instant classics” because who knows what the future holds for upcoming cinema, but if I may be so bold as to say so, there’s a timeless quality to this picture. Young or old, parent or non-parents are going to latch onto this story and these characters and fall in love with “Inside Out”. I feel like I need to see it again myself to grasp all of the intricate details peppered throughout and to catch all of the humor that I missed because I was distracted by a previous big laugh. I can’t recommend this film enough and when you do check it out; make sure you stick around for the credits because there’s a bonus in there for you that you won’t want to miss. (Theatrical version on the big screen, June 2, 2015)

    10
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    adamwatchesmovies@  5.7.2015 age: 26-35 2,867 reviews

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