The film’s protagonist is Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), who we first meet the moment she is born. The twist is that we meet her inside her head as she accumulates a core of fundamental emotions that will guide her life, each of which is personified as a color-coordinated anthropomorphic character. The first to emerge is Joy (Amy Poehler), who is personified as a bright-eyed, blue-haired pixie in a green dress who steps tentatively out of the ether upon Riley’s birth and finds herself alone in the “control center” of Reilly’s mind. It isn’t long before she is joined by her opposite, Sadness (Phyllis Smith), a short, blue lump with oversized glasses, a turtleneck, and a perpetual mope.

Riley’s early days are a push and pull between Joy and Sadness, externalized via cooing and laughing and crying and wailing, but as she matures, she develops additional emotions: Fear (Bill Hader), a high-strung, bug-eyed nerd in a bowtie; Anger (Lewis Black), a short, red square in a suit prone to fiery explosions of rage; and Disgust (Mindy Kaling), a sort of green-tinged mean girl with extremely long eyelashes. As the emotions grow, so does the control panel they operate, growing from a single button to a large array of buttons, knobs, and levers, all of which the various emotions control—sometimes together, sometimes in competition. The emotions also oversee the formation of Riley’s memories, which are personified as clinking and clanking marble-like balls that accumulate during the day. The really important memories—the core memories—create “islands” in Riley’s mind that become the foundation of her personality: love of family, friendship, honesty, goofiness, etc.

The reigning emotion is Joy, which means that Riley is fundamentally a happy kid. Although most of the action takes place within the imagined contours of her gray matter, we also see her from the outside, playing hockey on the frozen pond outside her house, going to school, making friends, etc. Joy oversees Riley’s emotional spectrum with a sense of pride, always seeking to keep the competing emotions, especially Sadness and Anger, at bay. And she manages this with great success until Riley’s life is turned upside down at age 11 when her family must move from Minnesota, where she has always lived, to San Francisco because her dad (Kyle MacLachlan) has taken on a new job. The exact nature of the job is left vague, but there are intimations that it is some kind of start-up venture that keeps him glued to his cell phone and in a regular state of stress, which means he has less time for Riley. Riley’s mom (Diane Lane) attempts to smooth things over, but nothing is the same: a new, smaller, dingy house, a new school with new students, a new urban environment—even the pizza isn’t the same.

And that’s when Sadness begins to take over, first by accidentally touching some of Riley’s core memories, turning them from cherished moments of joy into bittersweet odes to that which has been lost. Through a series of contrivances, both Joy and Sadness end up isolated from the control room, leaving Anger, Fear, and Disgust to run the show, which turns Riley from a happy-go-lucky kid into a moping, surly outcast whose behavior starts edging dangerously close to self-destruction. This is heady stuff for an animated kids’ movie, to be sure, and part of the power of Inside Out is the way it navigates its tricky emotional terrain, using humor and slapstick antics to balance out the increasing darkness of Riley’s emotional state. There are comical scenes worthy of Chaplin and Keaton, not to mention Laurel and Hardy, but they’re always in the service of expressing something about how Riley is feeling: the more mixed up she gets, the more conflict and chaos there is at the control console (we also see glimpses from time to time inside the mind of other characters, both major and minor, and one of the film’s funniest one-off visual gags is a quick view of the pandemonium inside the mind of an on-the-verge-of-puberty boy when he bumps into a girl).

The middle section of the film follows Joy and Sadness as they attempt to make their way back to the control center with Riley’s precious core memories as everything that had sustained her personality begins to crumble around them. They are aided and abetted at one point by Bing Bong (Richard Kind), Riley’s forgotten imaginary friend from her early childhood who looks like a pink elephant in tramp’s clothes. In many ways this is the weakest section of the film, even as it is essential to its narrative trajectory, if only because it treads too heavily in overly familiar action-adventure shenanigans, with Riley’s personified internal world turned into a crumbling obstacle course for Joy and Sadness to navigate. There are some inspired moments, though, including the film’s depiction of the “memory dump,” the place where everything we forget goes, and one character’s immensely poignant self-sacrifice.

In the end, Inside Out is most memorable for its core message, one that we would do well to heed in a culture that is constantly telling us to not worry and be happy. While much of the film shows us Joy trying to keep Sadness from touching anything and therefore imparting her emotion on Riley’s experiences, the film ultimately tells us that sadness is a crucial emotion that we not only all need, but to which we must respond in others. There is a tendency to think that happiness is the mood for which we should all strive, but sadness and melancholy have their place, as well. Just as the film itself balances humor and pathos, it suggests that true happiness is not a state of unblemished, perpetual bliss, but rather a balance of all those emotions that make us human and therefore capable of love and affection and tenderness.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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