Watt A Nerd Magazine Vol. 2. Iss. 3 || July 2015

Movie Review: Inside Out [minor spoilers]

This movie review is written by EstrangeloEdessa.

Pixar, Pixar, Pixar. You'll rarely meet anyone who dislikes this studio's films, and it's little wonder why. They've got something for everyone: bright colors and cheerful humor for the kids, death and misery and depression for the adults. Nowhere is the latter more true than in this year's summer movie, Inside Out. 

Some things that happen in this PG-rated children's movie:

1. a young girl literally loses the ability to feel joy
2. and then loses the ability to feel anything at all
3. after a character dissolves to death right before our very eyes

Overall it's a very heavy movie to watch. I cried about four different times. I went into the theater fully expecting to do so--movies about growing up always get this kind of reaction from me--but what surprised me was just how intense it was. There were no holds barred. And I think this is a wonderful thing. 

Movies about growing up tend to fall into one or two types. There's the "growing up is the best and I can't wait to do it!" type (such as The Thief Lord), and the "adulthood is evil and I'm never gonna let it happen" type (such as Peter Pan). Quite often they end with some sort of moral about how growing up is necessary and a whole new adventure and stuff like that. But never have I seen a movie so honest and realistic with its message as this one is. 

This movie takes the feelings and emotions of children and treats them as valid and important. This movie takes the weird, complicated, changing emotions of a pre-teen and never once claims that they're "just a phase." This movie takes the emotionless state of a person with depression and treats it as a real problem, not something you can just "get over," not something that is that person's fault. 

And this is so important. Too often we are told to just keep on being happy, to keep our chins up and let everything get better. To just let ourselves be joyful, as if it's something you can allow. It's extremely frustrating, naive, even selfish, advice. And fittingly, the character of Joy in Inside Out displays this exact type of selfishness. She treats Sadness like an inconvenience and nothing else. She's a little bit of a jerk. 

But in the end, Sadness saves the day, because Sadness is the only emotion that can make the girl feel anything again. Sadness is the only emotion that it's appropriate to feel, and the only one that it is right to feel.

And in the end, the message of the movie is this: Don't let anyone else make demands on who you are or what you feel. Feel whatever you want, whatever you need, to fell. And whatever you're feeling--no matter how terrible, or how complicated, or how scary it is--it's okay to feel that way.

And all of this is coded in bright colors and cartoonish anthropomorphisms that any child can understand. 

Inside Out is a movie that perfectly captures the complexity of childhood and adulthood, emotions and personality, and the things that make us us--but any movie could have captured that. This movie's true brilliance comes from its honest and empowering message. That's something extremely rare, and extremely important.