Inside Out announces itself as a movie about emotions—and it is—but it’s also about the making of our minds. And the minds that made it are among the wildest imaginations making movies today. It tracks a world inside the mind of eleven-year-old Riley, who is growing up and is trying to cope with fear, sadness, anger, disgust, and joy as her loving family makes a major life change.
To help us navigate this territory, writer-director Pete Docter and his team of first-class storytellers have imagined Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust as characters who run the command center—“Headquarters” (pun intended)—of Riley’s mind. The emotions work together like the best sitcom teams as they move through a wonderland from Headquarters to the vast library of Long Term Memory to the all-important Memory Islands under construction: islands that represent categories of memory that determine Riley’s identity (family, play, imagination, sports, and more).
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that more powerfully portrays for movie-going audiences the fierce intelligence, but also the fragility, of a child’s mind. Your timeframe may vary, but I was moved to tears within the first fifteen minutes—not by sentimentality, but by that rare experience of imagining things I had never thought about before, recognizing them as true, and then realizing the implications for me and for those I love. So many names of friends and family members went through my mind at different points in this journey as I thought of survivors of emotional abuse, of children dealing with catastrophic loss, of adults still burdened by the lasting effects of childhood trauma.
And yet—don’t get me wrong—the overwhelming mode of this movie is joy. —Jeffrey Overstreet (2015)
Arts & Faith Lists:
2015 Arts & Faith Ecumenical Jury — #9