INSIDE OUT (2015)



INSIDE OUT (2015)

This movie is about an 11 year old girl whose parents have moved from Minnesota to San Francisco. This is the dumbest move ever (because that’s where the 49ERS are).  Anyway we get to know her emotions animated style. Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler) is the dominant emotion most likely because damn…this girl plays freakin hockey and who the heck isn’t happy that plays hockey? Eventually sadness (voiced by Phyllis Smith) comes in and basically everything is messed up from that point on. Oddly her most likeable emotion I felt in this movie was disgust (voiced by Mindy Kaling) and to be honest the rest were just forgettable for me. Oh, back to the plot. It turns out sadness is messing up some of the core memories and now parts of Riley’s (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias who is very talented but so far has been in almost nothing) life are starting to fall apart. Strong points – the way this movie draws out the emotional landscape while simple and mostly incorrect, is completely fascinating and well done. This movie reminds me a lot of the imagination we saw behind the scenes in MONSTERS INC. Riley is for the most part likable, as are her animated emotions joy and disgust (even sadness at one point). This is also a movie after my own heart because “hockey”. There are not enough movies that involve hockey in some way. What the heck. They also cast Diane Lane as one of the voices. You always always cast Diane Lane (she’s Judge Hershey so you have to).


Where this movie just kind of misses the mark for me is because of its best moments. While we do get some tear jerking here, the film overall feels very much like we are watching a box blowing down a street. We are kind of curious what will happen but basically see cars coming and the predictability is almost mind-numbing for this type of film. The strongest parts of this movie are when the other characters emotions interact and react to Riley’s emotions. Sadly we only get a few minutes of this awesomeness and most of that is crammed into the closing credits (yeah what the crap). Instead we are subjected to the worst freakin imaginary friend ever and honestly this made want to run home to my tv set and on demand Barney episodes. On top of all this, the funniest parts of the movie are largely shown in the previews. Past that this is an attempt to be UP which I didn’t really love either. This movie isn’t bad, it just disappoints on a catastrophic level by showing us how great it could have been (by adding more interaction with other people) within its run time. 


GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF DISNEY/PIXAR AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.

Comments