The new Pixar film Inside Out has a concept that's hard to describe in words but makes perfect sense when you experience it on screen. It's set in the mind of a young girl, where each of her five principal emotions takes on a bodily form. Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler) is a peppy, can-do young woman; Sadness (Phyllis Smith) is a short, drab sourpuss in a thick sweater; Fear (Bill Hader) is a thin, nerdy, nervous ninny; Disgust (Mindy Kaling) is a green, judgmental teenager; and Anger (Lewis Black) is a boxy, combustible, red-faced stress case.
In the film's early scenes, we see Joy learning to share this imaginary mindspace with the other emotions, who appear as the girl goes from baby to toddler to infant and beyond, accruing experience and dimensionality along the way. It's sort of like a Pixar version of a bildungsroman crossed with Fantastic Voyage, with some Inception thrown in. The part that's hard to describe, though, isn't so much the nature of those five emotions as it is what happens to them as the girl, young Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), has to move from spacious, bright Minnesota — where she can run free and play hockey to her heart's desire — to cramped, dark San Francisco.
Suddenly, things that once caused her joy start to cause her sadness. In the mindspace, our heroes struggle to make sense of it all. There's an elaborate system whereby memories — depicted as orbs — are turned into what are called core memories. If Sadness touches a core memory orb, she can transform even the happiest experience into something painful that Riley will presumably carry the rest of her days, much to Joy's chagrin.
The bulk of the plot involves the constantly bickering Joy and Sadness struggling to get back to mind control after accidentally getting sucked into another part of Riley's brain, while Fear, Disgust and Anger are left behind the wheels. So it's part disaster movie: Anger and the others urge Riley to sneak behind her parents' backs and flee her home, as the brain's Island of Honesty (the brain has an Island of Honesty) starts to collapse.
It's also part odd-couple tale. In contrast with the resourceful, energetic alpha-female Joy, Sadness is a mousy, apologetic, self-loathing klutz. As the two make their way through the byzantine, ever-shifting corridors of Riley's mind, we gain newer insights into how personality changes. We also meet other characters who represent different aspects of the girl's inner life — most notably her once-imaginary friend Bing Bong (Richard Kind), a pink part-elephant/part-cat/part-cotton-candy creature who represents the innocence of childhood, and whose fate may just turn America's audiences into pure mush.
Most of all, Inside Out is an unlikely coming-of-age tale — not just for Riley herself, but for the emotions inside her. Our heroes weren't dropped into this girl's mind from the skies; they grew inside her, and to some extent they themselves are discovering the nuances and intricacies of this world as they go. That's a subtle but brilliant move: The complexity of Riley's mindspace can be bewildering, but directors Pete Docter (Up, Monsters Inc.) and Ronnie del Carmen and their team depict it in intuitive matter-of-fact fashion. They know we're not going to absorb it all in one go, so they let the complexity be part of the joke. The human brain, we understand, is a complicated place, and each new fold reveals new depths.
The power of Inside Out comes not from the derring-do of its setpieces (which are just rollercoaster-y enough to be engaging without being annoying) or the sharpness of its wit — unlike, say, Finding Nemo, it's not particularly funny. Rather, it comes from its ability to take processes and human passages we're all intimately familiar with — the way a happy memory can lead to profound melancholy, or the way a sad one can do the reverse — and turn them into the stuff of drama. That the drama comes via little imaginary animated creatures somehow adds to the pathos. Let Inside Out in, and it will wipe the floor with you.
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