Outwardly persuaded but inwardly unmoved

Joe on Inside Out

I sometimes think, Jenny, that I haven’t given animated films the attention they deserve. Not having children, I’ve missed out on classics such Chicken Run and Toy Story, which adult friends have praised for their wit, psychological subtlety and narrative sophistication. If I’d managed to achieve even the lowly status of weekend dad, I might have kept abreast of this burgeoning creative field. As it is I’m pretty much a cartoon virgin.

I’m afraid Inside Out didn’t do much to win me over. It gave me a lot to think about. It also gave me a lot of time to think about it in, while the ramshackle story rattled along. I realise I’m not the target audience, but I was left puzzled as to who the target audience might be.

It took me back to Everyman (which we reviewed last week). The anonymous author of that medieval allegory was interested only in moral issues, so the component parts of the human character are divided according to whether they’ll help him or not on his final journey to judgement. In the Inside Out version of the human psyche, all the internal characters are equally useful, equally valued. That certainly appealed to the secular humanist in me.

And how interesting that they are all emotions. It set me thinking about an Enlightenment version in which Reason would be precariously enthroned above rebellious characters such as Feeling and Fancy, who would be quelled only when it was revealed that they were secretly in league with Madness. The Romantic sequel would show Reason, quailing in the face of a tsunami of the Sublime, rescued by Imagination, her sails billowing triumphantly. By the mid-twentieth century, I suppose we’d have been watching poor battered Ego, squashed between a lordly Superego and a lewd and scabrous Id. That one would need an 18-certificate.

These thoughts left me more favourably inclined towards Inside Out, whose ideas of how the mind works are at least based on research, not guesswork or wishful thinking or patriarchal models passed down from antiquity. And so far as it has an ideology, it’s an ideology I can get behind, which values self-acceptance and suggests that bad feelings are better processed than punished. 

But allegory is a form with preachy tendencies. 150 years after Everyman, John Bunyan flagged up the message of Pilgrim’s Progress with characters called Timorous and Mr Worldly Wiseman. He didn’t want his readers to forget for a moment that the story was just there to sugar the pill. Pilgrim’s Progress isn’t the most exciting yarn, but it’s better than a sermon.

Inside Out is in this tradition. It’s better than a lecture. Bunyan showed us Pilgrim’s journey towards the Celestial City. Pixar takes us, in the company of Joy and Sadness and a half-forgotten imaginary friend, through the memory bank into the depths of the unconscious. It’s a story of danger and adventure and breath-taking escapes. But you’re never allowed to forget that this inside journey is just a metaphor for the day-to-day conflicts of family life. It struck me that, for a film that presents the human experience as a negotiation among emotions, Inside Out imposes on its viewers a surprisingly cognitive experience. 

Jenny’s heckle

No one can touch Pixar in their fabulous technical competence and their ability to tell a story. They can play to adults and to children simultaneously. Toy Story will appeal to any adult who remembers the pain of growing up and to any child who knows that their beloved toys are real. The characters are realised in depth and the plotting grips, whatever your age.

When I took my then seven year old granddaughter to WALL-E, she watched a touching love story. I watched a searing satire about our casual self-indulgence and the brutal destruction of our planet. Every time I see some tragically obese person sweatily trying to ease themselves into a seat on the bus I see those ranks of cheerfully fat people in WALL-E who can no longer walk and need to be transported everywhere by mechanical means on their new planet. I would put this movie on my top ten list of most brilliant ever.

But like you, I was disappointed with Inside Out. It’s ambitious. It reflects current neuroscience in basing the plot on evidence that the limbic system, the seat of our emotions, trumps the prefrontal cortex, the source of our self-flattering designation of our species as homo sapiens. It is accurate in plumping for one version of what these emotions are: anger, disgust, fear, joy and sadness. It is sophisticated in showing that some sadness is inevitable (though odd in suggesting that rationality never prevails, in spite of the fact that in the story this is what eventually happens). 

Pixar maybe got gripped by the science and forgot the need to tell the story. Their homunculi—the five emotions—seem only superficially developed. The human characters seem notional. The plot droops in the middle. Technically, of course, it’s just brilliant. The best bit to me was the final credits, superbly handled, reminding those of us who are parents that the challenge is lifelong, you just cannot get it right, those darned kids will always be one step ahead of where you think they ought to be.