Pixar goes totally emo in animated psyche trip 'Inside Out'
Scientific researchers have determined that humans possess anywhere from four to 27 separate emotions.
Pixar chose five of them to star in its weirdest, trippiest and most audacious animated feature yet, "Inside Out."
Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust won the Pixar audition over presumably lesser-talented emotions such as Boredom, Contempt, Embarrassment, Pride and Schadenfreude.
Just as well, because there are more than enough emotions in "Inside Out" to create a crackling smart, hallucinogenic adventure in which abstract thoughts ingeniously translate into characters plotting their way through a winding, Alice-in-Wonderlandish landscape of the mind to help an 11-year-old girl named Riley cope with the stress of life.
Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias) is perfectly happy as a hockey player at her school in Minnesota. Then her parents (Diane Lane plays Mom and Kyle MacLachlan plays Dad) announce they've got to move with her and her brother to San Francisco for a job.
Their new house is an underwhelming disappointment that only adds to Riley's increasing dissatisfaction with her new school of strangers. She has been seized with - Oh, no! - SADNESS!
What she doesn't know is that all of her emotions, and those of her parents, are managed and executed by actual emotions living in their headquarters.
Blue-haired Joy (Amy Poehler) tends to be the cheery leader who promotes harmony and happiness with twitchy Fear (Bill Hader), blowtorch-top Anger (Lewis Black), green Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and the ever-blue Sadness (Phyllis Smith).
They operate a Star Trekky console that controls how Riley responds to events, such as her first hockey goal or some other big moment classified as a "core memory," represented as a large glowing multicolored gumball.
Sadness begins to take over and poor Riley's core memory locations (among them Family Island and Honesty Island) implode and disappear, Accidentally, Joy and Sadness both get sucked up into a vacuum delivery tube and ker-plopped somewhere near Riley's long-term memory storage unit.
They've got to return to central control before all of the islands disappear, causing Riley to go, uh, I'm not really sure what will happen, but it will be bad.
Joy and Sadness embark on a treacherous Yellow Bricked road to headquarters, allowing the Pixar artists to go nuts with exploring a crazy kaleidoscope of drawing and animation styles.
"Inside Out" does what the best of animation can do: operate on one engaging level for kids; and on a higher, more challenging level for adults, who will greatly enjoy the movie's rapid-fire zingers and jokes based on harsh truths. (In one scene, workers dutifully remove the "Names of U.S. Presidents" ball from Riley's long-term memory.)
"Inside Out" isn't the first to use the clever concept of personifying emotional and physical control mechanisms. Still, Pixar took a real risk in pushing the outside of this psychological envelope.
That said, don't expect "Inside Out" to be as gratifying as earlier Pixar masterworks "WALL-E" or "Toy Story."
Once Sadness and Joy begin their grand quest back to headquarters, "Inside Out" loses its narrative velocity and becomes bogged down in extra characters and side alleys, although they pack varying degrees of "wow."
This movie could easily have turned Joy into the heroine and Sadness into a villain. Then, it wisely acknowledges sadness to be an important part of life's experiences.
That's why "Inside Out" is such a joy.
“Inside Out”
★ ★ ★ ½
Starring: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Richard Kind, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, Kaitlyn Dias, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan
Directed by: Peter Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen
Other: A Walt Disney Pictures release. Rated PG. 82 minutes