Film Review - Inside Out (2015)

Inside Out is the newest Pixar production and concerns 11 year old Riley who moves with her family from Minnesota to San Francisco and inside her head are 5 emotions: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust but when Joy and Sadness go missing Riley starts getting moodier.

Inside Out has been getting great reviews but mine will not be one of them but before I go into those reasons I want to talk about what I did like:

- The first is the ideas on display here and they are very good regarding the 5 key emotions and how they influence the mental and emotional health of the person they're inside of, it's a very strong idea especially if it regards a young person heading into adult years and the turbulent feelings they develop.

- The second is the voice acting, Amy Poehler is infectious as Joy and she really gets you invested in Joy's plight though my favourite has to be Lewis Black as Anger who has a lot of fun moments in the film.

But despite these strong elements on an emotional level I was never engaged with it and I feel that the problem lies within the script itself, the focus of the story never feels cohesive and what I wish had happened was being more about Riley being on the verge of adolescence and the more child like qualities in her mind trying to stop that but as it is I didn't really care about Riley as a character and her family just kept going on and on about the moving van for most of the film and as a result while the climax is well done I just wasn't all that interested.

And here is where I have to say that I'm not really a big fan of Pixar's work despite loving their Toy Story films, I just find a lot of their work sentimental and emotionally manipulative bordering on blackmail now I love their Toy Story films and some of their emotional points are well done (the opening of Up is wonderful) but most of the time I feel manipulated and not in a good way, it's hard to explain I know but this is how I feel.

And lastly there is a short called Lava before the film but it's not very good and can easily be skipped.

And so that was Inside Out, it has some good ideas and voice work but comes across for me as the Dreams of Ordinary Men to quote the Dragon song, 1.5 out of 5.