Inside Out: A familiar adventure

Inside Out (2015)

        Ever wondered why is your personality the way it is, why you feel so happy at times, why all your other emotions are snubbed when you are very sad, why you dreamt those dreams, why your thoughts are shackled when your are stressed, why your imaginations have a repetitive pattern, why you put forth your opinions as facts??? Inside Out explains all these in the most imaginative and colorful way possible.

Synopsis - After young Riley is uprooted from her Midwest life and moved to San Francisco, her emotions - Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness - conflict on how best to navigate a new city, house, and school.

Pixar consistently has been able to impress their audience with some great creativity and imaginations. Pixar mostly picks a very relate-able problems of life and scales it to imaginative ideas like toys, cars, bugs, monsters, rats etc. and create a new world where those problems are scaled to exhilarating adventures.

Similarly with Inside Out Pixar has chosen the most petty problem they have tackled so far and scaled it to one of the most exhilarating adventures. Unlike the other Pixar movies, screenplay was not just directly adapted from a real life to the imagination world, the entire world inside Riley's head had to be designed from scratch.

Each and every aspect of this world is scientifically logical and has been painted in the most imaginative way. We all are vaguely familiar how our emotions work, here the entire flow of a particular emotion has been characterized into a character responsible for that particular emotion, hence we meet Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger.

The story and direction of Inside Out shows how a petty problem seen by the outside world would be actually a big problem with life changing events inside our head. It also shows the changes occurring inside your head when you are changing from 1 phase of life to another. Every scenario can be easily related to our day to day events. Pete Docter has dug in deep to explore the psychological behaviors of individuals to write down a script this detailed and accurate.

The screenplay of the movie is filled with brilliance and creativity. The screenplay of the 1st 7 mins is so well thought than many full fledged movies. Each and every elements inside our head such as memories, dreaming, running thoughts with facts and opinions, imaginations, imaginary friend, abstractions (even explains the 4 stages), long term memory, forgetting, changing of personalities, emotional breakdown, blanking out etc. has been painted so well and seamlessly stitched into the main plot line. Each scene has been well thought and well written, not every writer can create a documentary of the functioning of your brain like Pete Docter did.

There is also a great bit of humor through out the movie and no where the humor interrupts the flow of the story and always moves along the story.

The pacing of the movie has been brilliant. Most scenes keep you at the edge of your seat guessing the next scene, speeds up whenever necessary and also gives you enough time to breath in the events and feel them without stalling the plot.

Not to forget another main aspect, music!! Michael Giacchino has formulated yet another master piece with which he is able to puppeteer your emotions at will. Now i am convinced why the Oscar panel has replaced him in place of John Williams.

Over all the movie has one of the most imaginative plot, with one of the most intelligent screenplay and direction. In the 94 min time window the emotions inside Riley's head seemed like controlling the emotions of the audience too. All types of audience can enjoy the movie. While adults can appreciate the complexity, kids can enjoy the colorful imaginations and have a visceral effect from the plot. Pete Docter is definitely the King of Animated Movies!!!!!

(P.S. the 3D to 2D transition in the abstraction chamber where the isometric lateral distance became longitudinal height just blew my mind!!)