Inside Out (Pixar) Review

I'm not really sure what else I can say about this movie by Pixar except that it is amazing. I think it ranks up there with what I call their "top trio": Incredibles (2004), Wall-E (2008), and Up (2009). I love all their stuff, but those three have always been their top tier to me (well, at least since 2009) ... and Inside Out has joined them. But it's also the kind of film that I don't think lends itself to a "thumbs up or thumbs down" rating based on examining a checklist of "issues" for films ... if you get it, you get it, and if not, you're probably not going to be convinced by exposition.

The main thing is that they managed to bring their brand of endearing characters and world-crafting into interaction with very insightful psychological commentary. And I don't think that it's easy to have such a direct depiction work out. I love a lot of M. Night Shyamalan's stuff, but I didn't think that Lady in the Waters worked out well (although I did also get a bit annoyed when people online were dissing it with high ethical-esque language like "holding to a higher standard" etc ... if you come out with as many strong ones as he did in a row doing all of it yourself, you deserve a sleeper or two, and half the hype is created by an audience who gets as hypo-manically excited about somebody doing all the jobs as does that person who is doing them does [MNS writing and directing and producing], so half the "hype" that the person "ought" to live up to was made by the critics/audience in the first place anyway) ... I didn't think doing a story directly about story worked too well, but I thought that was a very tall order to begin with, like Shyamalan bit off more than could realistically be chewed by anyone, but Pixar does seem to have made a great movie that is more directly (on the page) about one of the core elemental arenas that operates in film, human psychology.

I simply want to note only a couple of things here, and both of them relate in one way or another to a similarity between this film and Chris Nolan's Inception (2010).

Thing 1

The first thing is the structure of tiers, and this goes to being well-grounded in understanding human psychology. The number of levels isn't necessarily important. It is mainly that there are levels or tiers at all and that there is a dark and chaotic (Inception) or forgotten (Inside Out) place at the lowest level. Inception was 2010 and Inside Out was 2015, so there may have been some intentional modeling, but I would argue (vigorously) that it is not the type of modeling that becomes derivative. In Inception, they go down into a third dream layer (the car-chase / falling van with Yusuf left behind to drive and make the kick happen is layer 1, the hotel room with Arthur left behind to make the kick happen is layer 2, the snow fortress with Eames left behind to engineer the kick is layer 3) and THEN down into uncharted dreamscape (the crumbling city on the shore) and then EVEN FURTHER into the final layer, where Cobb finds Saito as an old man.The schema is relatively simpler and has fewer levels in Inside Out: The control center, the level of the islands with the longterm storage and other operations behind them (dream production and its entrance into the scary side of subconscious, abstract thought, etc), and finally the bottom level, the place of lost memories, Bingbong's final resting place.

I should take care of one clarification here for this first point: those deepest-down levels are not synonymous with the subconscious (Freud actually preferred "unconscious") that takes our hopes and our fears and the images form our experiences and turns them into our free association dreams. Those dreams are mostly productive in relation to their recognition by the conscious (in fact, I believe, and I have asked trained and practiced therapists about this and they loosely agree, that the free association process carries through into the "remembering" of the dream when first waking up, that in a sense, we're still "dreaming" then, still constructing it while "remembering" it). Rather, in terms of real world psychology, getting lost in those deepest-down levels, as Cobb and Saito or Joy almost do, is fully catatonic state.

Thing 2

The second point to make  has to do with the issue of motherhood. The Inception material is detailed in my post on that (which is on its way), and that is actually the main reason for my noting this in Inside Out (because it helps the thesis in my Inception post), because it's not the central theme in Inside Out because it has to do with the mother, rather than Riley.

But it helps to spell it out here: Why is the mother's lead emotion sadness, when the girls lead is joy? We clearly see that the mother's lead is sadness the few times that we hop inside her head ... so, why? I think the reason is postpartum depression. I'm not saying that she is struggling with PPD at the time of the film or that she must have gone into episode after Riley's birth. I am aware that the term is usually used primarily for actual depression episode of this type, and I don't in any way want to lessen the seriousness of that issue, but, as the wiki article notes, many women experience "mild symptoms," and I would hazard a guess and make a claim that all do, to whatever varying degree. Most often, the depression normalizes and integrates again into a healthy psychological flow and functionality (probably sometimes it's presence was hardly noticed even before normalization). But sometimes, from whatever specifics cause PPD (about which there are a lot of questions) there is difficulty with that process of normalization and the new mother has PPD episode and, like all with difficulties (like myself with BP2), to some degree or another, medication or therapy or both are needed to get that normalization back on track.

My point here is simply that, if (in Pixar's Inside Out world) sadness takes the lead in the mother's psychological functioning and this is because of postpartum depression, this means that motherhood defines women to an immense degree on the psychological level. This is not just the "traditional" reading of female gender as defined by motherhood in some quasi-ontological way. It's saying that psychologically, on the level of self-conception and psychological functioning, becoming a mother impacts a woman so strongly that her lead emotion becomes sadness because of postpartum depression, it actually switches from joy. It's a sadness that normalizes and integrates well with the other 3 emotions, particularly joy, in a healthy functioning psyche, but it is still significant that the lead emotion is now sadness. The shift in lead emotion indicates on how deep a psychological level the experience of becoming a mother impacts a woman.