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| Directed by Pete Docter and Ronaldo Del Carmen Written by Pete Docter, Meg LeFauve, and Josh Cooley |
Once upon a time, and not really that long ago, you were America's gold standard for theatrical animation. Disney was a fallen titan, DreamWorks was a pandering celebrity-cameo factory, and you were the actual artists in the field. The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature - an award created during your initial heyday - used to be called the Pixar Award in the popular parlance, because you kept winning it by earning it.
There's an entire generation for whom your name conjures the same kinds of memories as the Disney Renaissance does for the Millenials, and I'm part of that generation. The Incredibles was the first time I thought I needed to see something in theaters. The first press screening I ever went to was Ratatouille, your name became a seal of quality, one that ensured that whatever it was attached to would be an inventive take on a subject - and probably something that people would enjoy.
But ever since Up, you've been letting yourself fall further and further behind, and the rest of the field has been catching up to your Golden Age. From the nostalgia exploitation of Toy Story 3, to the cynical cash grab of Cars 2, to the tragic misfire of Brave, you just seem to have lost the magic, and in the meantime everyone else has figured out how it works. DreamWorks gets lavished with praise by critics now, Warner Bros. brought their animation department back from the dead, and people are shocked that their movie about Lego didn't get an Oscar nomination. Disney embraced CG animation and, after some early stumbles, rediscovered how to make films with relatable characters in interesting twists on established genre-staples. (fairy tales, video games, superheroes, etc.) They've taken your job, and they're doing it well.
So Inside Out is the project that either proves you have a serious problem, or the project that brings you back from the brink. You didn't seem to have much confidence in it, the first teaser felt less like an ad for Inside Out and more like an ad for "The Pixar Collection: BluRay Edition", which combined with greenlighting sequels to Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, two of your most lauded successes, added yet more credence to the idea that you h ad finally lost your creative soul to the Disney Empire, and are now wholly dependent on nostalgia for the period when you were still relevant...
... until now. Old friend, I'm glad to see that you've gotten your act together. Not only has Inside Out brought you out of your downward spiral, but it may just be some of your best work since, well, probably since Up. It feels like you had some emotions to work out of moving in with Disney, and you decided to make a film about the emotional struggles of a young girl going through the major life change of moving to a new home.
To wit, Inside Out is about a girl named Riley, and the little voices in her head. Those voices are her emotions, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear. For eleven years, Joy has been the dominant emotion in Riley's life, dominating practically every new memory of her idyllic existence in Midwestern Rural Tranquility Land. Until one day, when her father gets a new job out in California, and moves the family out to San Francisco. Naturally, what with leaving her friends, staying in an unfamiliar environment, catching brief glimpses of her parents' financial troubles, Riley's emotions start to fall into chaotic discord, resulting in Sadness corrupting and releasing her "core memories", i.e. the experiences that define her personality, nay, her identity, and forcing her and Joy out of the brain's central command, leaving Riley's actions in this crucial point in her development to be governed by Disgust, Anger and Fear. The only way to stop that is for Joy and Sadness to make the trek back through her memories and keep her from having a complete mental breakdown.
It feels like you dealt with the emotional shock of living with Disney by getting incredibly drunk, and your last three movies have been a really bad hangover. But now, you've sobered up, you're ready to start the day new, and you're getting back into the field, having become stronger through that struggle and channeling it into your comeback. You've dealt with some real depressing thoughts running through your head, and you get something that most existential angst-ridden teenagers don't. You get that sadness isn't inherently negative, that it's more of a release valve for emotional tension, that sometimes you just need to let it all out in order to move on to something positive.
And you've just plain got the technical chops, man. You never really lost the ability to make things look pretty, and Inside Out is no exception. Your colors are still bright and vibrant and well chosen, your voice cast perfectly embodies the emotions they depict, you come up with imaginative ways to depict the inner workings of the brain (dream production studios, vast labyrinthine memory archives, literal trains of thought), and at the core of it all, you've rediscovered how to tap into the emotions of the audience. I never thought I'd see an audience close to tears at one of your films after Toy Story 3, but you pulled it off. Hell, you even managed to do 3D well, you didn't have to do that, it's beautiful just the way it is.
Inside Out is arguably the best Pixar movie to date, but besides that, it is a cracking good adventure story that has more to say about how people deal with complex emotions than most grown-up movies do. I'm impressed, old friend, keep up the good work.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
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