Inside Out was a fun animated film. I’d say that it was a bit better than I expected although I did find one of the main characters to be pretty annoying and the moral at the end of the film was pretty iffy. I can’t say that I agreed with it or at least the way that it was handled. Still, Inside Out holds its own here and the writing is solid.

Imagine a world where humans were actually complex machines which had their emotions become tangible beings that can control the person’s actions. Each emotion had a role to play and they worked in harmony to control every decision that you made. If they were to ever have a big disagreement and split up, then the human robot would shut down for a brief amount of time. The film goes into the details of how the human machine works in great detail, which is pretty fun. The actual plot of the film follows Joy as the main character.

Joy is essentially the ideal character. She’s extremely optimistic and always tries to see the positives in a situation. It’s easy to root for her and she does her best to ensure that every day is a good one. Unfortunately, Sadness wants to corrupt everything that she touches and gets Joy into a lot of trouble as the two of them fall away from the control center. They must now make it back to the human robot quickly or the girl’s social life will be ruined. After all, how can a person have a good life without any joy or sadness? The only emotions left are disgust, anger, and stress. Definitely not a good way to live there. Can Joy make it back or will Sadness continue to hold her back?

It’s probably obvious from the summary, but I do not like Sadness. She’s a debbie downer and the kind of person who doesn’t even enjoy Christmas. Essentially every line that she has is a complaint or a sigh where she tries to make everyone feel bad. Not content with just making herself sad, she tries to bring down the mood for everyone else as well. Sadness even goes as far as to corrupt the human’s happy memories and turn them into sad ones. In case you think that this is all just an accident and Sadness doesn’t mean it…think again. She does this on purpose. There are several times when Joy tells Sadness not to touch anything, but she does anyway. She ignores the warnings and causes as much damage as possible. Typically, she’ll do this immediately after being warned, which makes the whole situation even worse.

Joy is the opposite and ends up being a very good character. She’s essentially perfect. A character who’s always determined and likes to do things the right way. I’ve already talked about her so let’s move on to the next character. Disgust probably gets the smallest role out of the emotions and I can’t say that she’s a good character either. I don’t even consider Disgust to be a primary emotion, but I suppose that we were running out of them by this point. She doesn’t help out at all either here so the group would have been better off without her. At least she doesn’t openly try to put the team in jeopardy though.

Nervousness or whatever the emotion is officially called is decent. He’s always stressed out about everything that’s happening in the world so he’s on top of his game. He was even one step ahead of Joy when she asked him to write down a list of the things that can go wrong. Stress always brings his A game and he’s not afraid to go for the win. Finally, we have Anger, who’s another solid character. It’s always fun to see him grab the controls and blow up as he goes for the win. He tends to lose, but he talks a good game and Anger has more character than most of the other emotions. He certainly doesn’t let himself get pushed around although he tends to make the situation worse for his human.

Aside from the emotions, we’ve also got the other humans who have emotions of their own. We typically don’t see the other emotions, but it’s always interesting to see their other views. This even applies to dogs, cats, and just about anything else. The parents get a decently large role here. They’re pretty nice and the whole situation with the house can be a bit dicey, but they weren’t over the top as far as being unreasonable goes so the main character had no reason to be mad at them. It’s all because Joy wasn’t there of course, but you’ll just feel bad for them. That being said, there’s no logical reason why a pizza store wouldn’t have pepperoni. I think that was a bit iffy if you ask me and the scene could have been written better if we needed a situation to give the main character some tension. Bing Bong is an imaginary friend who couldn’t keep up with the opponent which goes by the name of age. I definitely didn’t mind him leaving the film as he was another character that I didn’t like. He nearly destroyed Joy by not thinking about what his secret short cut really was. His rocket was decent, but if you were supposed to cry for Bing Bong at the end..I can safely say that it didn’t happen in my case. He wasn’t the kind of character that you would get very attached too and he was just too much. If only Bing Bong had been cooler as I did like the name.

The film isn’t too short, which is good since it gives us some time to see all of the characters and explore this concept. I like the concept behind the idea that our emotions are actually sentient beings who control the human shells from within. A whole movie can be made about that…and it was! That being said, I didn’t agree with how the moral was presented as mentioned above. Basically, we are supposed to wrap our heads around the fact that our happy memories have sadness with them and that makes them even better. LOL No!

Let me give you an example. Brace yourselves here. I remember a few years back when I managed to acquire pounds and pounds of chocolates to save for my birthday. Dozens of different bags of chocolate chips, cookies, brownies, ice cream, and more were assembled. Seriously, we probably spent over 200 dollars on snacks alone for the Birthday, but it was worth it! I grabbed a huge Turkey container (Think of a big pan for pasta, but deep enough to fill in 3x that) and I stuffed the snacks inside before eating. I ate for hours and hours until my stomach was so full and I was so stuffed that my teeth began to hurt. Do I want to remember my teeth hurting? No, I block that out and just remember how amazingly good the pot of snacks was. My point is that happy memories are epic because they are happy. We don’t need any sadness messing that up.

Sadness does help us develop our character and make us better people, but it doesn’t mean that we have to corrupt our happy memories. That’s exactly the train of thought that makes people so miserable in day to day life. Whenever someone says that they aren’t looking forward to Christmas or always has a pouting expression on their face, I feel like facepalming myself. Enjoy every day folks because that’s the point of life. While we’re living, we may as well be having a blast. So, I feel like Inside Out dropped the ball on that, but it’s fine…we can’t win them all.

The animation is all right. It’s not really my style and I’ve seen animation from a decade ago and even older than that, which looks better. Still, this American Animation is really well liked and gets good reviews, but give me something a little flashier and I’ll be happy. The human characters are drawn in that intriguing CGI style that lets you immediately know that this is an American film. While we are way ahead of Japan in Live Action, they are decades ahead of us in animation. At this point, I’ve accepted the gap as a fact in life, but maybe we can change that someday.

Overall, Inside Out is a good film and it deserves the positive reviews. I had fun watching it and the film does a good job of world building. It’s an interesting film from start to finish and it never drags on. Good films don’t need action scenes to be enjoyable as this one proves, but then the writing has to be on point. Luckily that was the case here. I’m not ready to say that it’s as good as Frozen as the ice themed film still has the edge, but this one is on the same level. It just needed a super catchy song to keep up with Frozen and that didn’t happen. Take Sadness away from the film completely and who knows…maybe it could have won! I don’t think a sequel would be as good though. Certainly not if we had any hintings of romance. The emotions inside of the mom were already pretty iffy and it was an unnecessary scene that they had. The ending helped to stop that, but things could have been dicey. I still want a sequel though, but let’s make it a direct to DVD futuristic robot action adventure story to shake things up.

Overall 7/10