Untagged spoilers ahead. You have been warned.
For one week straight, ever since Iâd seen it, Iâd been trying to get a grasp of why I had such a violently negative initial reaction to Inside Out. I mean, I adore its characters and concept, I feel the movieâs emotions and atmosphere ring true for me, its soundtrack and visuals are gorgeous, and I canât help but keep churning out stories based on it â shouldnât all that have enabled me to see past its faults and embrace its good points?
But Iâve finally figured it out. The true problem I have with the movie. Itâs crystal clear to me now. And in fact, itâs so obvious that Iâm angry with myself for not seeing that sooner.
But to understand that, we need a quick review of my previous points of concern from my initial review, and the reasons why theyâre not the actual problem:
- Plot holes and headscratchers: Thereâs quite a list of them, which is highly unusual for a Pixar movie, because remember, âStory is king.â But I still do trust Pixarâs storytelling decisions enough to give them the benefit of the doubt here. Most of those things would be easy to explain if someone had made it a point to actually do it. So I genuinely believe the Pixar people have explanations for all of these and just accidentally cut them when trying not to clutter the movie with âunnecessaryâ stuff.
- Execution: Yes, there were some things that werenât really well done, among them Joy handing over the Core Memories to Bing Bong â because was there anyone who didnât know at that exact moment that something was guaranteed to happen to him? But those were instances. For example, Andyâs gasp when Bonnie makes Woody wave at him in Toy Story 3 feels incredibly unnatural and forced to me, but it doesnât take away from my general enjoyment of that gorgeous ending, or the movie as a whole. (In fact, I still think Toy Story 3 is one of the best movies ever made.) So this canât really have been my problem with Inside Out, either.
- Glossing/missing character moments: Thatâs the tricky one. I complained about, among other things, Fear, Disgust, and Anger having so little character moments that they âmight as well not be there.â And that mystified me for a while, because they do have their moments. Angerâs fury about the gum commercial is hilarious, Disgustâs âyeah⌠letâs do itâ before they plug in the idea reveals a powerful range of hidden depths in just four words, and Fear basically just needs to open his mouth to make me fall in love with him. (And him cowering beneath the console is one of the most adorable things I have ever seen. But I guess Iâm biased.)
So why my impression of âmissing character momentsâ when thereâs so much to love about them? Itâs not that theyâre not personalities. Itâs something much simpler, and much more disastrous as a result.
Thereâs no character development.
Well, Joy does develop, of course. But everyone else is shallow. In fact, many of them end up being the exact same person at the end of the movie that they were at its beginning. Theyâre almost completely static.
To elaborate:
- Letâs get Joy out of the way first. She starts out as an endearing but annoyingly hyper control freak whose only goal in life is to make Riley happy, and not only does that get to the point where sheâs willing to leave Sadness behind in astounding cruelty, she even later realizes that everything she ever believed is wrong, and doesnât hesitate to act on that realization and make things up to Sadness.
- Sadness herself is pretty jarring, considering that she gets so much screentime. At the start of the movie, she instinctively knows whatâs good for Riley and steps in to do that when the situation requires it. At the end⌠she does the exact same thing. Yeah, sheâs getting pretty self-deprecating on that cloud, but sheâs also âhaving a breakdownâ almost right when she first starts talking in more than two words at a time. The only thing that changes for her is that at the end of the movie, she knows what sheâs there for, but realizing that wasnât her doing; it was Joyâs. In fact, we donât even get to see how Joy explains it to her. So all in all, Sadness doesnât develop as a personality.
- Fear, Disgust, and Anger are the worst offenders, and their development is so non-existent that I can just lump them together here. Fear starts and ends as nervous, jumpy, quick to cuddle, and with an overactive imagination, but reasonable and supportive. Disgust is a âlovable alpha bitchâ with a weak stomach, prone to sarcasm, and while she has that moment of provoking Anger at the end, sheâd already been set up as something of a strategist early on, when she stated that âwe donât want to talk to them, we want them to like us.â And Anger is impulsive and rash, violent, also pretty sarcastic, and hates being touched. And stays that way.
- You might want to argue that Riley does change – she loses her Personality Islands and gets new ones, she breaks down and cries at the end, etcetera. And youâd be right. The problem with Riley is that most of her actions are extensions of her Emotionsâ actions, and thus, her character development is only a result of Joyâs. Nothing Riley does feels like her own doing (at least to me). Joy basically âstealsâ her character development and claims it for herself.
- Mom and Dad have always loved and will always love their little girl. Theyâre supportive, affectionate, have a sense of humor, and donât hesitate to talk to Riley about difficult things. Yeah, thereâs that underlying tension between Mom and Dad, but that gets maybe two minutes of screentime in total with the tiny Helicopter Pilot subplot, but câmon, thatâs more thrown in than anything else, and doesnât count as development anyway because their little breakup/makeup thing is established right at the beginning when they almost start fighting over the missing moving van.
- Not even Bing Bong gets any development, and thatâs saying something, since he saves Joy by allowing himself to fade away in a Heroic Sacrifice. The thing is that said sacrifice results from something heâs known from the moment we meet him â the fact that âthereâs not much call for imaginary friends lately.â
The amazing thing about the missing development is that thereâs quite a supply of epiphanies going around in this movie. Everyone has one.
- Joyâs is, of course, the role Sadness plays in Rileyâs life.
- Sadnessâs is the same, except that she needs Joy to tell her.
- Fearâs is that they âcanât make Riley feel anything.â
- Anger and Disgustâs is âwhat have we done?â
- Rileyâs is that she doesnât want to run away, except that itâs Sadness who makes her realize that by removing the idea.
- Momâs is that Dadâs a âgood guyâ while Dad realizes that the facepainting thing is something his wife approves of. And they both realize that Riley has more problems with the move than they’d assumed.
- Bing Bongâs is that he won’t be able to make Riley play with him again.
The thing is that, except in Joyâs case, not a single one of these epiphanies changes the characters as personalities. They just go on the way they always have up to that point. (Well, Bing Bong is excused, I guess; he doesnât exactly get much time to act on his. The sacrifice was prompted by it, and if heâd been around longer, he might even have changed as a person.) Some of them get at least some acceptance of their situation out of their epiphanies, but on the whole, these realizations are largely ignored, and as a result, almost no one in this story evolves.
âBut wait a minute!â you might argue now. âNot every character needs development. Finding Nemoâs Tank Gang didnât develop, either! Youâre just stingy because your favorite character didnât get more screentime!â
Nope, sorry, Iâm more objective than that. (Though I can see why you might be thinking that.) And itâs true, the Tank Gang had no character development whatsoever (except for Gill, of course). So whereâs the difference?
The difference is in the way our (or at least my) expectations were raised. I didnât see Finding Nemo until years after its release, but looking up a few trailers on youtube, theyâre just that â trailers. They introduce the characters, talk about the plot, show a few jokes, inform you who made the movie, yadda, yadda.
In the case of Inside Out, on the other hand, the marketing treated all five of the Emotions as equals. The majority of the little videos and images tended to either come in five different flavors or show everyoneâs reaction at the same time. Whatâs more, the character with by far the most promotional material was neither Joy nor Sadness â it was Fear. Shoes of Doom, a prominent role in the Five-Second-Rule clip, constant repeats of his Butt Monkey tendencies, loads of toolkit animations, etcetera, etcetera. All Joy and Sadness had going for them beforehand were the trailers, two or three toolkits, and the one-minute conversation in Long Term Memory. Oh, and Joy got a few expository voiceovers that didnât add all that much to her character.
So with all that focus on those five characters as a group, I donât think it was unreasonable to assume that the three left in Headquarters would get a bit more to do than âfurthering the overall plot.â
Have a look at Oozma Kappa. Everyone on that team has a struggle to overcome. (Yes, even Art.) Those struggles might be miniscule and negligible, but theyâre there. And how many of the Toy Story toys have their own little character arcs? Even Brave has more character development than Inside Out does, and thatâs saying something because thereâs actually a lower number of characters with large speaking roles in there.
So yeah, thatâs my two cents. The good thing is that, now that I understand this, Iâm back to loving the movie the way I did before Iâd seen it. (Which probably sounds really paradoxical. :D) Instead of dwelling on the negative, I can appreciate its good points now. And if Iâm lucky, Pixar might just be planning to expand on this awesome world and its awesome characters. A sequel? Short films? A series, perhaps? Whatever it will be â Iâm all for it.
I’m thinking of you guys.
UntoldStories113 