It's all in her head

Inside Out is the latest animated feature from Disney and Pixar Studios, and it’s rapturously good, one of the best ever to come from the studio that is, as I’ve said before, as good as it gets. It plays with ideas—and the operative word here is “plays”—that stretch the limits of what children can understand and absorb. Indeed, stretching the limits of a child’s developing mind is a major theme of the story and screenplay by co-directors Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen (in collaboration with Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley).

The seed from which Inside Out grew must surely be Reason and Emotion, Walt Disney’s animated short of 1943. Produced in the midst of World War II, the cartoon was meant to bolster morale on the home front by personifying those two concepts—Emotion, the primal caveman-or-woman, and Reason, the prim professor-or-schoolmarm —struggling over the controls inside a man or woman’s head, the basic moral being “listen to reason.”

In Inside Out, the premise is more nuanced and less sociopolitical. Instead of an adult John or Jane Q. Public, we’re in the head of an 11-year-old girl named Riley. Instead of the grown-up stresses of wartime, Riley’s crisis comes when her family moves from the idyllic coziness of Minnesota to a grim and dingy San Francisco where Riley has no friends. And there’s no simple reason/emotion dichotomy this time. Instead, Riley has five conflicting emotions vying for supremacy at “headquarters.” And each emotion has its reason.

The emotion that spends the most time in Riley’s driver’s seat is Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler); she’s the one with the most seniority, the one Riley first experienced. Others come along in their turn, and the eventual complement consists of Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling) in addition to Joy. Together they preside over Riley’s experiences, represented by glowing balls tinted with the appropriate emotional coloring as they roll through headquarters on their way to storage in Long Term Memory. Every now and then a golden Core Memory rolls through; those will be channeled to reinforce one of the Islands of Personality that provide the bedrock of Riley’s essential character.

Joy remains the acknowledged leader of the team, but Riley’s uprooting from her Minnesota home taxes her ability to keep the others in line. Especially Sadness, who begins to assert her passive-aggressive self, touching every new memory and turning it her own shade of blue. Sadness even begins tingeing the Core Memories and undermining Riley’s Islands of Personality.

Joy, in her efforts to make Sadness keep her hands to herself, drops her guard just enough for disaster to strike: both she and Sadness get sucked into the Memory Hole, leaving Riley Headquarters in the unstable hands of Anger, Fear and Disgust. Under their shaky control, Riley has more and more trouble adjusting to her new home and hatches a plan to run away from home. Meanwhile, Joy and Sadness strive to make their way back to headquarters—through Long Term Memory, the Subconscious, Imagination, Abstract Thought, all in hopes of catching the Train of Thought back home before it’s too late.

As all this suggests, Inside Out is extremely well-thought-out on both narrative and psychological levels. The adventures Joy and Sadness undergo in their journey are as varied and imaginative as Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz. In this way Pete Docter (and I tend to give him the lion’s share of the credit, since his fingerprints are on much of Pixar’s best work over the past 20-plus years) introduces children to sophisticated psychological concepts, just as Disney did with Reason and Emotion 70 years ago, putting them in the context of an exciting journey through unknown dangers to the safety of home.

Joy comes to see that she and Sadness have to go through life hand-in-hand. That may by Inside Out’s most sophisticated concept of all—learning that lesson is, in its way, the beginning of growing up. The greatest joy and beauty of this joyously funny, sleekly beautiful movie may be that it gives children—and adults, for that matter—an inside-out sense of what makes them tick.