Thanks, I Hate It: Inside Out

Ideally, a metaphor captures a scenario or concept and reinterprets it in visual and narrative language which provides a fresh perspective on that source. Think of the titular creature in Alien and its life cycle as a kind of reimagined rape, a process of penetration, violation, and theft of bodily automony made viscerally easy for anyone to imagine whether they’ve experienced it or not. Think of the Overlook Hotel’s transformation into a hell of ghastly visions and dead-eyed phantoms which echo and re-echo the domestic violence tearing the Torrance family apart. These movies engage their subject matter in ways that make those subjects more tangible, easier to touch and feel and turn over in one’s mind. Inside Out, like a mid-2000s Xzibit meme, puts an emotion in an emotion so we can feel while we feel.

It’s a movie so literal it defeats its own purpose, its anthropomorphized emotional states play-acting through a plot directly analogous to the life of their pre-adolescent human host. The whole thing is soul-curdlingly bland and antiseptic, a vision of the human mind’s interior with all the imaginative flair of a cynical theme park design scheme. A few lone Seuss-like flourishes float in the film’s visual void as its sickeningly cute characters chirp and twitter at each other on their way to learning that it’s important to feel sad sometimes. It’s not a bad subject for a kids’ movie, but Inside Out is so cack-handed with its gushy reverence toward entrepreneurial spirit and the idea of hard work as a virtue that it falls completely flat.

The movie’s sheer ugliness, its office park aesthetic, is the single worst thing about it. How could anyone involved believe they were capturing a child’s inner life with these coldly adult visuals? The kid, Riley, is a collection of one-note upper middle-class touches wrapped around a plot which does nothing but provide weird magical post-hoc explanations for her emotional difficulties. I have seldom seen a film which so transparently wanted me to find it wondrous and moving while understanding absolutely nothing of the experience of having unmanageable emotions as a child. In boiling Riley’s world down to colorful cartoons running around a gigantic machine Inside Out reduces her emotions to cogs spinning without reason or origin.

Inside Out is a movie made from a place of emotional alienation, the product of a work environment which exalts literalism and process over sensation and inhabiting the body. Like the dream production studios it literalizes in its movie, Pixar is a cold, dull place where dramatic elements are nailed together and sent out into the world to perform some pre-programmed task. It’s the creative arm of Silicon Valley reaching out to get its fingers into the minds of kids across the world, teaching them that work is central to everything, that the normal belong to the exceptional, and that when we forget about our imaginary friends they drop into a massive abyss in our mind and dissolve like a body in a barrel of sulfuric acid.