Pete Docter’s Inside Out: Critique Movie

Inside Out Film Critique

The 2015 film Inside Out is an animated adventure, comedy and drama film produced by Pixar Animation Studios. Directed by Pete Docter, the film is set both inside and out of an eleven-year-old girl named Riley Andersen’s mind. Within her mind, five different emotion characters: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust dictate all of her responses to her every day life. The story begins by showing the progression and development of her mind, as well as the development of Riley.

Everything within her life is normal up until a major turning point, when she is forced to move away from Minnesota to San Francisco because of her father’s job. This causes her inner emotions to have a lot to deal with and caused many unhappy memories to be created. Joy is the main character that is followed within her inner mind due to the fact that it is a constant struggle for her to keep Riley positive in her new environment.

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Within her inner mind, the emotion Sadness begins to touch happy memories and turns them to sad memories. This causes Joy to panic, and she tries to keep Sadness from doing it again. She fails in doing this and Sadness ends up touching a core memory, which defines who Riley is as a person. When trying to dispose of it, Sadness, Joy, as well as her core memories all get sucked out into the maze known as long-term memory storage. The other emotions are left with the job of running Riley’s life without Joy or Sadness present, causing disastrous results.

As the movie progresses, I begin to doubt that Riley will every regain her former self. The fact that she is living her life without Joy or Sadness makes me believe that she truly will do things that she would regret. Within her mind she is destroying key aspects of what makes her an individual. As she runs away from home in an attempt to regain her former life, she disconnects herself from her friends, family, and even her comedic side.

Within the film there are many key messages that are put across. Some of these include the usage of sadness in order to learn lessons and value in the things that you do, the value of friends, family, and how they impact your life, and how it is important to stay strong and work hard at shaping your own life the way you want it to be rather than running away to a life that is no longer yours. Thematic content is very well shown within the film due to the shear nature of the film. It is based around emotion therefore it is expressed very clearly.

I would recommend this film to anyone who enjoys an animated family film full of comedy, some drama, and full of key lessons to be learned because of its clever idea of turning emotions into characters. I would rate the film ten out of ten because the message of the film is important and encourages the viewers to think about their own lives, making the message very powerful.