Friday Film Noir
Inside Out (2015) is a nearly flawless animated journey directed by Pete Docter and written by Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley. The film places us inside the mind of Riley, an eleven-year-old girl whose life is upended when her family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco. Inside her mind, five personified emotions—Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger—manage her inner “Headquarters” as she wrestles with homesickness, change, and the confusing space between childhood and growing up. The film traces how those emotions shift and realign as Riley begins to understand that life is not only about feeling happy, but about learning how to feel everything and still move forward.
Behind the imaginative visuals and playful humor lies a carefully researched psychological foundation. Pixar’s creative team consulted with emotion scientists to understand how memories form, fade, and sometimes reshape themselves, and used those ideas to design the mental landscapes inside Riley’s mind. The filmmakers experimented with nearly thirty possible emotions, but ultimately chose five to keep Riley’s internal world both simple and true to human experience. I’m a bit biased about this film because when my own children were just four and two, they walked out of the theater talking about the emotions that lived inside their heads, which I think is a beautiful thing. The film won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
2015 • PG • 1h 35m
