Brilliantly inventive but not the 10/10 of the trailer

Rating: 8/10 (29 July 2015)

Pixar excel in making multi-layered films that can be enjoyed by kids and adults in equal measure. They have also developed a truly astonishing ability to tap into a parent's deepest emotions, such that while their kids were quietly enjoying the first few minutes of "Up"; Jessie's song from "Toy Story 2" or Andy leaving for college in "Toy Story 3", their parents were sobbing hopelessly into their sleeves. Inside Out, the new Pixar animation, is a very subtle case in point. And it's also far too clever to be wasted on kids.
Inside Out chronicles the middle-class trauma of 11-year old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) who has to leave the bucolic charms of Minnesota (did she never see "Fargo"?) to be dragged to the uncultured wasteland of San Francisco, and forced to cope with the 'horrors' of a new house, a new school, yada, yada. So far, so yawn. Except that we experience all of this through the emotions in Riley's head brought vividly to life by Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear. Sitting – Star Trek Enterprise style – at a console somewhere behind Riley's forehead, they watch what's going on and control her emotions to suit.
When things go badly awry, Joy and Sadness are pitched out of the control room and dumped into the depths of Riley's long term memory (an area bearing a shockingly multi-coloured resemblance to the Hall of Prophecies in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"). With no joy or sadness in her life, how can Riley cope? There follows a desperate mission to return Joy and Sadness to the HQ, aided and abetted by Riley's long-lost imaginary friend Bing Bong, before her life is permanently wrecked by bad decisions.
Let's start with the positives on this film. Inside Out is enormously inventive. If the Indiana Jones series drove an interest in kids doing degrees in Archaeology, then the same could happen for Psychology as a result of this movie. At the very least, you can see how kids with issues of anger management or depression could really get genuine value out of this simple movie by visualising and therefore understanding their problems better. The sociological impacts of the movie might actually be quite profound.
All the leading actors lend their voices to very believable characters, with Diane Lane (Martha Kent from "Man of Steel") and Twin Peak's own Kyle MacLachlan also being very effective in voicing Riley's Mom and Dad respectively. The animation team do a splendid job in rendering both the wild excesses of Riley's brain and the seedier foggy streets of San Francisco.
Michael Giacchino again comes up trumps with a moving and highly effective score.
And that trailer. Boy, that trailer! If I ever wanted to see a film more this year after viewing a trailer, it was this one. Brilliantly zipping from Riley's brain to the Mom's brain to the Dad's brain and back again, and making "Brazilian helicopter pilot" a defining synonym for day-dreaming and lustful women.
Unfortunately, and slightly disappointingly for me, this sequence was also the best bit of the film. We spend 90% of the rest of the film inside Riley's head. And whilst there are wildly inventive moments in that world – for example, while she sleeps, the day's memories are being dispatched to long term memory, and the Hollywood style movie studio kicks into dream productions – some of this running time is borderline dull. Whilst kids will no doubt remain mesmerised by the antics, the comic potential of the interplay between the emotions in different people's brains is barely tapped again. (Almost in recognition of this lapse, we get treated to a very amusing mid-credits sequence zipping in and out of human and animal brains). If there is a sequel to the film (and it's notable that the console "puberty" button was never hit), then with any luck John Lasseter will instruct his team to provide more of this type of content: there is comedy gold to be mined there.
On possibly a purely personal note I was also rather distracted by the animation of the hair of Joy and Sadness: perhaps it worked better in 3D than 2D, but it looked to be a bad photoshop paste effect to me.
As I mentioned up front, the film is subtly moving. An important lesson it teaches ('teaches' like being hammered round the head with a candy-covered truncheon) is that it's "OK to be sad sometimes". Do you remember the time around age 11 or 12 where you grew up just enough that Christmas Day didn't seem QUITE as thrilling and exciting as it did when you were 6? And didn't that cause those joyful present-opening "core memories" to be tinged ever so slightly with a haze of nostalgic sadness? This film amplifies those feelings through a prism of faint regret, and older viewers should be prepared to shed a tear or too over the lost joys of years gone by. The genetic code of "Up" was clearly preserved in amber and emerging at random. You have been warned.
So in summary, "Inside Out" is a great film and well deserving of your cinema dollar, but perhaps a smidgen disappointing in its execution when set against the overall marketing hype, and particularly the bar set by that glorious trailer. It will still make a fortune for Disney and Pixar though, and good luck to them.
Finally, the Pixar short – Lava - tells the musical story of an old Pacific volcano seeking the love of his life, and is an animated delight that had me grinning from ear to ear. I just lava-d it! Do NOT arrive late. Do NOT miss this.
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