Post 580 - Flashback Comment on "Inside-Out" from 2015

 

Regarding "Inside Out" (from a 2015 notebook)

 

I attended a two-day Pixar "masterclass" seminar in Toronto a few years back, and have just finished reading an extensive analysis on the Pixar methods in Jonah Lehrer's book, "Imagine," where committees gather for long breakfasts to dissect seconds-long shots frame-by-frame. "Inside Out" suffers from that sort of over-thinking. 

The technique and craft are there, almost shockingly realistic during moments in the girl's hockey game, but soooooo much effort is spent for us to "understand" the character of internal Sadness, so much that Sadness starts sucking the life from the story:  it takes cutaways to what the parents' minds are processing to slice some of the melancholy and pre-pubescent angst out of the air. 

There are many possible setups in the school scenes to explore - the cliques, the classroom - but this "What Dreams May Come" for tweens provides slow-motion crumbling of personality islands and repetitive starts and stops in the story instead.  And with everyone seeking out the "central control" (like some rogue agents from "24"), they miss that the workers sucking up unnecessary memories have a direct line to their destination, about halfway into the film!

Some of the musical choices seem committee-determined as well, with "It Only Takes a Moment" creeping out of the background (another "Hello Dolly" reference? A "Wall-E" connection from some trending internet flowchart?). Emotionally, it tugged the right strings, but "Inside Out" seemed a LOT longer than its 94 minutes.  But why should we care so much about Sadness, and why should a company whose entire product and apparent mission seem to be about imagination have a subplot that celebrates the loss of an imaginary friend from childhood?

And, as if to confirm my suspicions, just before the final credits came a collection of scenes visualizing the emotions of some background characters and even a few random animals -- and then, suddenly, briefly, and after an hour and a half, I finally experienced a Pixar movie.