Docter: Inside Out (2015)

How does the world feel to a child raised on digital media, a child who’s compiled and stored more data than they’ll ever be able to retain by the time they’re a teenager? That’s the question that Pixar has seemed to be asking over its latest generation of films – how to nail that demographic – culminating with Inside Out, the first film in the Pixar universe to feature an everyday, realistic character – a twelve-year old girl named Riley – as protagonist. There’s a catch though – most of the action takes place inside Riley’s mind, where the emotions of Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Anger (Lewis Black) and Fear (Bill Hader) collaborate and compete to regulate her moods and memories. Digital minds are often figured, onscreen, as fluid, provisional and improvisational, and while there are certainly traces of that here, the film’s power lies more in the way in which it captures the mechanised, externalised consciousness of the social media addict – the sense that all your feelings, memories and experiences are somehow out there, more organised but also more free-floating than ever before. As a result, Joy, Sadness, Digust, Anger and Fear don’t feel exactly inside Riley, but nor do they feel quite outside her either – they emerge from her in the same way that the cloud emerges from individual hard drives, or the mind was once thought to emerge from the brain. Not only does that disaggregate Riley much more than you might expect – the emotions are the real characters here - but it sets the film a peculiar challenge: how do you create a mindscape, or mindspace, that is at once mechanical and amorphous, internal and external, human and post-human? The answer looks a bit like Myst crossed with the perkier, brighter palette of the Pixar universe – a giant ball-bearing machine that unfolds before us as Joy and Sadness find themselves jettisoned from “Headquarters” and forced to traverse one part of the mind after another. Along the way, there are a few whimsical moments – the train of thought, the land of imagination – but for the most part this mindscape is too efficient, elegant and economical to admit of much whimsy. Instead, it tends towards a schematic sparseness and Cartesian minimalism that subsists on texture as never before in the Pixar universe, evincing an animation aesthete’s delight in surfaces, and the sounds of surfaces, that gives it a highly cerebral edge, culminating with production designer Ralph Eggleston’s “electrochemical” philosophy for visualising the emotions themselves. As might be expected, that’s quite an austere aesthetic, and for those raised on earlier Disney fairy tales, or even earlier Pixar fairy tales, the move from self-realisation to self-regulation might seem somewhat somewhat disarming – it feels right that the majority of emotions are voiced by actors from The Office and Parks and Recreation – as well as somewhat vertiginous, as Riley’s peaks and troughs sync up with the lovingly painted San Francisco backdrop in quite sudden and unexpected ways. But there’s also a message about resilience here, a guide to managing your digital consciousness without succumbing to depression – or datageddon – that not only flies in the face of conventional wellness wisdom, but does so quite unsentimentally, if only because the whole mechanics of the film unpack and undo the Pixar production of sentimentality, growing out of it before your very eyes.