Watch your emotions become emotional...

Rating: 10/10 (5 June 2015)

This film is a wonder: it is a visual feast, its story is multi-layered yet focused and relatable, and it brings so many ideas that truly work best in the art form (not genre!) of animation. It has become my personal favorite film from Pete Doctor, and it is easily the best film from Pixar since Toy Story 3 or Up.
Inside Out hits all the marks: strong creative visuals, interesting characters, an enthralling story and a level of depth and understanding of human emotion that really brings a lot of your own personal connections and thoughts onto the surface. After viewing the film I couldn't stop thinking how effective and educational the story is about understanding how we all operate day-to-day, dealing with each moment and event and how our emotions influence our actions. The film has a number of qualities, for instance, it works just as well as a coming- of-age film, as it does an adventure film, and in a sense, a team or workplace film with the office setting being inside the mind.
It makes complete sense that the project comes from and is led by Pete Doctor (with the help of co-director— and my favorite Pixar story artist— Ronnie del Carmen). He is able to breathe new life into Pixar with these new characters, bringing the studio back on track, and pushing it in new ways of storytelling. He handles the strong emotional aspects that film depict so well, such as joy (literally, the character Joy!), sentimentality, drama, and so on with the utmost care. Pete and his team are able to inject a great sense of honesty and purity into the film, which you begin as an outsider viewer, and you then become a participant and connect with the story with each beat.
After our SIFF screening— during the Q&A with Peter Doctor and producer Jonas Rivera— Pete talks a bit of how this film truly utilizes the strengths and advantages of animation for telling a story like this. I completely agree as watching the film, I just kept thinking of other ways this story and its emotional connections can be done. (And with respect to "Herman's Head", which I did watch and love as a kid!) I realized that true emotions are raw, and they are just expressionistic to its core. We all have our own interpretations of our own emotions — as well as others— and it's a challenge trying to visually represent all that universally.
Animation uses caricature, exaggerated movement, and specific pacing and shot design in unique ways that allows for ideas like Inside Out to work so well. While we're given the visuals, the sound, and the story, animation is still able to provide a bit of leeway that other film art forms cannot. Animation allows the audience to interact with the story in a unique way: with imagination. Seeing a caricature and the visual design of an element in the film allows us to make our own connections, and that creates a better understanding of what that element is and what it represents (example: Joy's character design and her poses mimic a bright shining star, and these techniques carry-on to the other emotion characters). And it's because of qualities like this that helps us connect to the characters and the events on-screen so well— to the point that our own feelings start to peek through and we create that emotional bridge.