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Thanks, I Hate It: Inside Out
🕑 Added 2019-12-20 19:44:38 +0000 UTCIdeally, 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.
Comments
Jerna Van Vooren
"Inside Out, like a mid-2000s Xzibit meme, puts an emotion in an emotion so we can feel while we feel." GRETCHEN!! I laughed out loud at this!!
Molly Coddles
Very well said! I was initially a little excited about this film solely because, knowing the basic premise that it takes place inside a child's head, I knew that there absolutely must come a point where the protagonists were called to explore the nightmare subconscious and I was stoked to see this bit. I probably should have known from Pixar's cv that they wouldn't actually make that nightmare subconscious at all actually threatening or even interesting, but hope springs eternal. From the moment early on that the film establishes that the main girl is scared of clowns, I knew it was coming and I was willing to sit through a lot of pointless noise to get there. But when the moment came, not only was it over in an instant (and ultimately pretty irrelevant to the whole movie) but it was rendered in the exact same friendly, toothless style as the rest of the inside out world. I've never seen an animated moment with so much potential so completely squandered. I know that lamenting that childrens' films aren't scary anymore is something an old person does, but, damnit, it just wasn't scary! Even garbage kids fare like Rockadoodle, We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story or even the old carebears movies had the courage of their convictions to make the threats threatening. Sorry for the long comment, I have strong feelings about this! XP
