Inside Out (2015)

Synopsis: A little girl acts all emotional and shuts down because her feelings screw up. So a pretty typical tale of the female gender.

Would you be able to sit through it?: Totally. I mean, we all grew up once, right? Nope, I’ve been this age the whole time.

Any scary/violent parts?: A dog is cut in half. Nightmare clown.

Anything that will screw up your kid’s head?: They may think it’s ok to steal their mom’s credit card out of her purse, and then go to the bus station and buy a ticket because they will absolutely sell one-way, multi-state bus tickets to an 11-year-old who’s alone.

Any lessons to be learned?: Kids have to grow up sometime, it can’t be all joy forever. Chicks are complicated.

Recommended age: 6. It’s mostly cartoony-cutesy but there is a pretty good deal of deep emotional emotions, which I suppose some people have, sometimes, I guess.

Of course, I was obsessed with how they ripped off the “positive” line:

from Andy Sidaris’s Day of the Warrior (46 seconds into this trailer):

3D?: Nah. We saw it in 3D and there wasn’t any noteworthy 3D effect to speak of.

Rent it, buy it or avoid it?: Buy. This is an excellently made movie with a surprisingly deep concept that is executed very well, but I didn’t really love it. It’s all pretty predictable, and Joy and Sadness, being the main characters, are kind of irritating. And look at Riley from the outside: she turns into a jerk and runs away after 3 days of moving to a new city? Ironically, she’ll probably be forced to go to therapy after this, where a psychologist will try to analyze what’s going on in her head. But I’m a bitter, jaded old man whose complex period of growth was spent playing Blades of Steel and watching Quantum Leap. It hit me a little harder as a dad of a young girl who will have to go through all of this, while I appear to act concerned and let her mother deal with it. All right, maybe I’m not that harsh, because I did almost gush tears during the “Take her to the moon for me, okay?” part. That was almost as bad as Ellie’s funeral from Up.

So all in all, Inside Out is a very good movie, and particularly great voice acting, especially from Phyllis Smith as Sadness and Lewis Black as Anger. Although, I liked Pixar’s last picture, Monsters University, better (and Wall-E, Up, Ratatouille, and Finding Nemo), and I liked Toy Story 3 much better, and I think that’s a superior “growing up and moving on” tale. I hope there’s a sequel to Inside Out where the nightmare clown has run amok inside Riley’s mind and has caused her to descend into madness, titled Riley Gets Married.

Score: 8.25 lobotomies (out of 10)

My Daughter’s Review: “My favorite character was Sadness, because she’s blue, like your shirt.”

Preceding Short: Lava was lovely. A beautiful tale of volcanoes falling in love, set to Hawaiian music, which is enjoyable to everyone unless you were raised in a Hawaiian gulag, forced to listen to such music while you were whipped with pineapples on chains. If that’s the case, then you won’t want this free sample of the newest Yoplait flavor, Pineapple Chain Whip.