Inside Out, soon to be a major emotion picture

Inside Out, the latest Disney-Pixar coproduction, feels like a clever educational short stretched tofeature length. It has plenty to teach viewers about the workings of the human mind (writers JoshCooley, Meg LeFauve, and Pete Docter reportedly spent years researching the subject), and itemploys an array of imaginative strategies to make those lessons palatable to a wide audience. Mostof the film takes place inside the brain of Riley, an 11-year-old girl; the principal characters areanthropomorphized versions of the five emotional states that govern her personality--joy, sadness,anger, fear, and disgust. The story takes place over a few weeks after Riley and her parents movefrom Minnesota to San Francisco, focusing on how the emotions respond to various stressorsassociated with this big change. That challenge turns into a full-fledged adventure when some ofRiley's "core memories" are misplaced during an anxious episode and Joy and Sadness must journeythrough the brain to recover them.

Riley's mind looks a bit like Disneyland, with components of her identity--her imagination, her senseof familial belonging--represented by different islands, which in turn are connected by a literal trainof thought. The tower where the five main characters work suggests a NASA mission control center,the emotions using complicated gadgets to process Riley's memories and determine her reactions tovarious stimuli. Realized in meticulous detail, these mental landscapes convey an infectiousfascination with the complexity of the brain; they also reflect a vaguely antihumanist sensibility thatregards people as giant machines. The mix of childlike wonder and cold rationalism is characteristicof Pixar, whose movies (WALL-E, Brave) can feel so enamored of their own technologicalsophistication as to detract from their warmer, more winning qualities.

Inside Out is especially poignant in its handling of Sadness, characterized as a ne'er-do-well whowants to be part of the emotional team but keeps making mistakes. (One clever detail is thatSadness turns any memory she touches permanently blue.) Joy's uneasy partnership with thisunwanted emotion makes for an effective metaphor about growing up. As any child matures, shemust learn to accept sadness as part of life; so Sadness becomes more important to the story asRiley comes of age, even performing a crucial role at the movie's climax. Unfortunately that climax isso loud and busy, like that of any recent superhero movie, that it's off-putting; once again the Pixarteam are too distracted by their gadgets to think about people. v

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