Inside Out
Year: 2015
Rating: PG
Length: 95 minutes / 1.58 hours
It’s amusing that a movie studio like Pixar—which has been making us feel all our emotions for decades— made a film solely about those emotions. They already succeeded in making me cry in almost every other film of theirs, and this is no exception. And while they’ve always had some significant lesson in them, Inside Out (2015) feels like the best kind of therapy you can buy to make discussions with your kids much more approachable. After all, emotions are part of the human experience and everyone can relate to these feelings in some small way, at a minimum.
Visually, Inside Out is great because it combines some well-done realism with the spectacular imaginative world inside a pre-teen girl’s head. There are a ton of great jokes based on wordplay that are both funny and somewhat educational. The voice acting is superb, and the plot is a solid exploration of how to navigate our feelings. If anything, I’m glad I can watch this with my kids because it gives a fantastic jumping off point to discuss basic emotions while also giving room to expand to more difficult topics like depression.
Even if some of the inner workings of the mind might go over a child’s head, Inside Out has a foundation that emphasizes that there are no bad emotions. It’s completely natural to feel angry, afraid, disgusted, or sad. Just like it’s natural to feel joy. That all of these are part of a well-rounded life is useful to remember—even for adults. We all want to be happy as much as possible, but if we suppress emotions like sadness, then we can’t have those temporary lows with which to compare the joyous highs.
A fantastic conversation starter about basic emotions, I give Inside Out 4.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
