Pixar has taken a whole heap of crap for only casting males as their protagonists. The rat, the fish, the robot, the toy and its owner — all boys. The female characters that surrounded them were all richly drawn and memorable, like Eve and Dorrie, to name two but never had a film to call their own. Brave was the only film released by Pixar to feature a female lead but there were annoying complaints coming from the Pixar fans that it wasn’t up to the level of their other works. With the latest from Pixar star director Pete Docter (Up, Monsters, Inc.) Pixar has both created one of their very best films and one with a female lead.
The glorious and imaginative Inside Out takes a basic concept of a young girl’s emotional development at birth and opens up a whole universe inside her head. There’s “joy” and “sadness,” “fear,” “disgust” and “anger.” They fight each other for control over the girl’s emotional well being with joy fighting the hardest to win out over the other emotions. This is a kid who is generally happy so her “joy” is a dominant character.
Amy Poehler is the voice starring as Joy, which makes her always funny and sometimes irritating, deliberately. She’s full of life and smarts and eventually learns that it can’t always be all joy all the time, that other emotions play a part in shaping who we become. Watching the young girl grow up and lose much of her memories and happiness, and even the things she used to love like sparkly rainbow unicorns is bittersweet, to be sure. This is, in a way, a reboot of Toy Story from a girl’s perspective because it involves a whole bunch of little creatures focused on the happiness of one child. But a person’s inner emotional life is boundless in what kinds of corners are available — like the subconscious (scary), or the imagination (surreal).
As we watch our young ones grow and discard all that made them children, we watch a different person emerge in adolescence. That is, in the end, what Inside Out is about. But it’s also about the magic and daring of Pixar, a company that encourages originality and bursts of creativity like this. They make it work somehow by creating whole worlds we’ve never seen and making us believe they exist. You might find yourself checking your own sadness and joy after viewing the film. I know I did.
Despite seeming like a silly romp aimed at younger kids, as it moves along Inside Out becomes deeper, darker and more moving. Ultimately it made most of the audience members around me cry. It’s a film that can soften the surliest of hearts. When it hits, it hits hard.
The animation is astounding, as expected, and the inside jokes aimed at adults whip by. They save one of their best moments for the credit roll but I won’t spoil those here because they’re meant to be surprises.
It has been mostly depressing to watch those movies that were planned so long ago by the uber gods at Pixar revolve only around male characters. That helped to set up a model that would be hard to shake. In some respects it was then in Pixar’s hand to help switch that. While audiences are still conditioned to warm up more to a male character than a female one, things are changing in that respect. Frozen became a phenom because it was such a good movie. It didn’t matter in the end that its leads were female.
The same can be said for Inside Out. It, like Mad Max: Fury Road in one fell swoop erases the impetus to tell stories where only men are important.
See, now, that wasn’t so hard, was it? All they really had to do is take a script they would have written for a boy character and flip the gender. She’s still a hockey player, for instance, traditionally a “boy sport.” They don’t rejigger her emotional life to make her more subservient or irrational. There isn’t any marker to identify her as a girl except that she’s a girl. This is where feminism wants to go, incidentally. We don’t want to take over the world we just want to know we exist and that we matter, as people.
Inside Out is funny and full of life. Growing up is hard. Watching young ones grow up even harder. Too many animated films romanticize childhood without acknowledging that bumpy roads make us more interesting. This film helps us to remember how oddly complex and unique from one another we are because of the way we build our memories. For an animated film it slyly goes deep. It will melt your heart and make you laugh. It will surely be one of the year’s best.