Sad is Good!

"If you say What The Fuck one more time, I'm gonna shame you on Fuckbook" 

 I   s a generation of young people ready to feel sad at the movies again as they did in 1982 in parts of E.T.? Can children raised on youtube and the internet concentrate long enough to comprehend the human psyche and its five components of joy, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness? The folks at Pixar appear to believe that the answer to both of these questions is "Yes" and have made a film that is completely unorthodox in a movie climate blatantly overloaded with sequels, CGI dinosaurs and robots.

Inside Out starts off as its trailers indicated: 11-year-old Riley has five voices in her head which all contribute to who she is (unfotunately, she is not schizophrenic . . . sequel?). Naturally, and in typical Hollywood fashion, the leader of the five is "Joy" making Riley a predominantly happy child.

The happy scenes—although necessary—are relatively boring and predictable until her parents whisk her off to San Francisco and her life takes a dramatic change. Her old friendships crumble, she breaks down and cries in class on her first day in a new school and she quits hockey, sending islands in her mind crashing into an abyss of darkness full of lost and or useless memories.

Joy then takes it upon herself to save Riley and ends up getting lost in her mind along with Sadness who really is the star of the film. It seems that Sadness can't keep her hands off of Riley's happy memories (softball-sized marble-textured objects) and tries to change their color from bright yellow/gold to blue, thereby making them sad. Joy tries to keep Sadness away from the memories of an eleven year old and that's when things get interesting.

As Sadness and Joy make their way through Riley's mind, they encounter her dark subconscious that is guarded and locked, her "train of thought" which literally is a train, and her imaginary friend Bing Bong, who probably deserved a better fate.

While the duo continue to try to figure out how to make it back to Riley's "headquarters"—a kind of command and control center—the viewer is subjected to a self-indulgent animated adventure reminiscent of what Tarantino fell victim to in Inglorious Basterds.

It turns out that indeed, sometimes, we need to be sad and judging from Inside Out's wide success so far and its stellar reviews, children can handle its heavy subject matter as easily as they can text "LOL".

Yes, the folks at Pixar can be considered geniuses for taking a chance at making a film where joy is not all it's cracked up to be, but, they know it all too well.