The new Pixar film about an 11-year-old girl’s moment of crisis and change is called Inside Out, and it’s a perfect title—maybe too perfect for its own good. Everything the movie shows going on inside Riley’s head is glorious. And that’s most of what we see, so Inside Out deserves to be called the best American movie of the year so far. Still, Inside Out does not reach the heights of Pixar masterpieces such as Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., and Toy Story 3. Everything out—meaning Riley’s interactions with her parents, her friends, her school, and the outside world during a difficult family move—is kind of blah.
Yes, the great irony here is that in a movie that tells the story of the inner workings of Riley Anderson, Riley Anderson is the least interesting character.
The other great irony is that this wonderful movie for children (my 11-year-old daughter thought it was the most brilliant thing she’d ever seen, and “brilliant” was her word, not mine) is based on a segment of a self-consciously dirty movie from 1972. That movie was Woody Allen’s sketch-comedy film Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask, which concludes with a screamingly funny scene set inside a modernistic control room that turns out to be the brain of a man in the midst of carnal flagrante delicto.
Here, the control room is headed up not by Tony Randall and Burt Reynolds, as it was in Allen’s film, but by Joy (voiced beautifully by Amy Poehler), one of Riley’s five primary feelings and the one to whom the others—Anger, Fear, Disgust, and Sadness—have ceded leadership.
The world inside Riley’s head is a marvel. The different aspects of her personality appear outside the control-room window in the form of theme parks—her childish silliness is represented by Goofball Island, for example. When Riley makes a memory, it appears as a kind of white marble that rolls down a marble run and then drops into a storage facility. If Sadness gets near one, the marble turns blue (like Sadness herself).
So Joy spends a great deal of her boundless and cheerful energy trying to keep Sadness (given indelible voice by Phyllis Smith) busy or idle or as far away from Riley’s thoughts and memories as possible. The other emotions have their moments—Anger and Disgust team up when Riley must eat artisanal food. “Congratulations, San Francisco, you ruined pizza!” shouts Anger as a slice laden with broccoli is put before Riley.
Joy’s efforts are mirrored by those of Riley’s distracted parents, who seem to want to know only that she is doing well, even though they have just pulled her away from everything she’s ever known. “Where’s my happy girl?” each says to her, as though being happy is her primary responsibility.
Things begin to go south when Riley is asked to introduce herself to her classmates. She begins to cry, and Joy notices that Sadness has touched one of the controls and then has touched a memory. In a desperate effort to expunge the long-term effects of Sadness’s intervention, Joy tries to intercede before the memories can be made permanent—and Riley’s childhood personality begins to literally disintegrate.
From this point on, Joy and Sadness end up together on a journey through the other parts of Riley’s mental and psychological machinery. The degree of invention codirector and co-writer Pete Docter and his Pixar colleagues bring to offering a visual portrait of both consciousness and the unconscious is all but beyond praise. They took four years to work it all out, and the time was very well spent.
Alas, there is a cipher at the center of Inside Out. Riley’s emotions are dynamic and well-conceived, but the person who embodies them is an excessively ordinary little girl. I’m sure that’s intentional on Docter’s part—he wants us to realize that Riley is unformed at the beginning, and that by the end of the movie she has matured into a more complex creature. But an unformed character is not an interesting character, even if an unformed character fits the movie’s clever scheme. What it means is that we don’t care what happens to this kid, even though what’s happening to her is supposed to be the whole point.
It’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Riley Anderson *Not That You Asked.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
