Really?

Rating: 5/10 (16 November 2015)

Being a fan of Pixar and judging by its reception by IMDb users and critics I was expecting this to be their best film to date. That seemed like quite a feat to top, as I personally think 'Up' is one of the most beautiful films ever made, so seeing as this was supposedly better than 'Up', I came in to the theater expecting something truly extraordinary. What I got was one and a half hours of bad puns, a superficial script which did not even scratch the surface of any sort of deep thought, and I also got several very forced "emotial" moments. And to top things of, the films rendering and animation was just above decent.
You will without a doubt have seen how people describe how tears were flowing when Bing Bong was left in the pit of black memory balls. It was so terribly sad when Jar-Jar Binks came out of nowhere and was extremely annoying for 5 minutes, before heroically sacrificing himself while delivering a line of dialogue which did not make me cry so much as sigh out loud.
I can assure you, dear reader, that I am not as grumpy as this review will have it look. I have yet to watch the opening of Up without having tears running down my cheeks. In order to explore why this film failed to deliver any sort of emotional punch, I will compare it to Up. First of all, what made Up such a powerful experience wasn't just the sad story of a man losing his wife, it was the music, the lights, and the colors. All of these things combined delivered a wide range of emotions without ever a word being uttered. My big problem with Inside Out was mainly the lack of this type of haunting beauty.
The script has been praised as ever so clever, witty and original, and I'll admit the film had me smiling at a few of the jokes. But the originality of the script can only be stretched as far as the idea of the film. The actual film lacked a lot of depth and ended up being almost bland. There was certainly potential of a great film in the idea, but I could not help feel that these ideas were lost when trying to keep this as a children's movie, which prevented any type of deep exploration of real human emotion and behavior.
All of the points above leave me rather confused about what Inside Out really was, or rather what it tried to be. Was it a comedy? Sort of... Was it an adventure? Well, sort of... Was it emotional? Well, not really... Was it exciting? Well, sort of... Was it even a film? Well, sort of... A not very arousing conclusion to this review of what could have been Pixars greatest film. In the end people might be so caught up the great idea behind the film, and this excitement means they would have decided on an opinion before even seeing the film, and thus, an 8.4 rating on IMDb