Inside Out Review: Reading Minds

Riley's emotions look on in Inside Out

Photo Credit: Walt Disney Studios

Inside Out

A+

A review by Frederick Cholowski

Welcome back Pixar.

After an unprecedented streak of not making a bad film Pixar began to enter a bit of a slump. Cars 2 was a shockingly bad (by Pixar standards), Brave was meteorically generic, and Monsters University was fine but did not have many of the elements that made Pixar films of the past so special. Inside Out, Pixar’s latest, is the studio’s return to what made it special and is a great reminder of what made me fall in love with the studio in the first place. Creative, funny, and full of heart Inside Out is one of the best films Pixar has ever created and one of the best of 2015.

The concept of Inside Out tries to answer the old question of what are people actually thinking. According to the film the mind is broken up into five emotions, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and fear who combined all determine how a person acts. The human at the center of Inside Out is a young lady named Riley (voiced by Katlyn Dias) and her along with all of her emotions (voiced by Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, and Mindy Kaling) must deal with moving away from her childhood home in Minnesota to a new unfamiliar one in the middle of San Francisco. Along the stressful journey both Joy and Sadness get lost in the banks of long term memory leaving only Anger, Disgust and Fear in charge which threatens to ultimately change the base of Riley’s personality.

As with every great Pixar film, the creators use wildly creative concepts in order and tell a story of basic human emotions. The realizations of all of the emotions and their role in shaping memories and personality is so beautifully realized on screen it is stunning. All the ins and outs of how memories are stored and shaped along with how someone’s personality is formed is absolutely magnificent and provides opportunity for amazing looking animated vistas. Every portion of Riley’s mind from the headquarters to the subconscious are explored in such interesting and funny ways giving life to every encounter throughout the runtime of the film.

Of course no Pixar film would be complete without a huge amount of heart at its centre. One of my main complaints with the last three Pixar films was that they lacked any semblance of the heart that defined so many of Pixars’ previous works. Either it felt really forced (Cars 2 and Monsters University) or it really did not connect (Brave). Inside Out is Pixar’s return to the perfectly integrated emotional storytelling of their past, giving us a human story of leaving a place we love behind and adapting to something new while at the same time dealing with our own emotional turmoil. It’s fantastic and heartfelt while never feeling sappy or forced in any way. Inside Out also manages to integrate humor into the proceedings in wonderful ways, throwing in great, mostly adult oriented, Jokes to help lighten up the sometimes heavily emotional proceedings.

The voice cast are all superb and wonderfully cast. Amy Poehler feels as though she was born to play the role of Joy and it even feels very similar to the character she played so masterfully on Parks and Recreation. Phyllis Smith is hilariously melancholic as sadness bringing a lot of humor and heart to the proceedings. The rest of the emotions paly a little bit of a back seat but it is always amusing to see Lewis Black get super angry, or Bill Hader freak out about random things. The voices of the human characters are also perfectly done, Katlyn Dias is magnificent as the central character and her parents voiced by Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan do perfectly in their reactions to the new stressful situation.

As per usual with Pixar the animation here is stunning. As mentioned earlier, the realization of the mind and all of its elements are beautifully realized and unlike anything I have ever seen before. Everything in the film just pops off screen, every idea is so colorful and creative at every turn. It really makes for a fully fleshed out world that looks pretty from its first frame to its last. The score is also wonderful outlining each element of the film with the perfect emotion. Pixar’s technical performance has always been a strong suit and Inside out is no exception.

Inisde Out is one of Pixar’s finest films and a spectacular film to bounce back with. The film succeeds at being beautiful in both a visual and storytelling sense in a way only Pixar at their peak can capture. If you only want to see one animated film this year I have a good feeling that nothing will surpass the wonderful Inside Out.

Game of Thrones “Hardhome”: Winter has come

Are you not entertained? The image that has been making the meme rounds from Sunday's Game of Thrones

Photo Credit: HBO 

Some quick bullet point thoughts on what is perhaps Game of Thrones’ finest hour as soon as I drink every drop of water on the floor…

“He always comes back”

-Sam

Holy Crap!

Beyond that I don’t have too much time today so let’s get straight to the bullets…

• I’ve very much enjoyed this season of Game of Thrones and believe it is the best the series has done yet. Being a reader of all of Martin’s novels I’m finding that the more and more that Benioff and Weiss are deviating from the source material the better and better the show is getting. What works in Martin’s novels at times hasn’t worked in the show particularly keeping the characters so far apart and having the overall plot move as slowly as the books let the character development stew. A lot of that does not work on television and it seems as though the writing crew has begun to speed things up a little bit. Characters are going through plot and meeting each other on a great frequency. There have still been flaws, evil Ramsey does not seem to have any point or any other characteristics then being evil, and the show uses rape or attempted rape with a surprising frequency without ever really paying it off with all that much emotional significance, but there have been so many exceptional elements that the flaws often feel marginal in comparison.

• Speaking of, how about the final 30 minutes of this episode. Game of Thrones often feels like it has a pretty large budget for even a big HBO drama but boy this takes the cake. Jon and the wildlings’ confrontation with the dreaded white walkers is perhaps the greatest action set piece in television history. The jaw dropping CGI, and camera work were second only to the simple amount of storytelling that happened in one 30 minute sequence. One of the flaws of last season’s big penultimate episode action sequence was that I really did not care about much of anything going on throughout the sequence despite it being filmed and beautifully put together. That was not a problem here as the sequence focused on not only creating a grand sense of dread and tension but  focused on small character arcs within that gave the sequence a little extra punch. The death of the main wildling woman as she couldn’t kill the undead children with the setup of her loving her own daughter more than anything else in the world made it extra special and devastating when she woke up as an undead at the end of the episode. In all it was completely jaw dropping on a scale that we haven’t seen before and has become the new gold standard of what an action sequence can accomplish on television.

• The rest of the episode was much quieter but almost as fantastic. As mentioned earlier many of the show’s character interactions have been made better with many characters coming together and that is no more evident with the interactions between Tyrion and Daenerys. Sure we are only at the very beginning of the arc but the two awkward dynamic sequences between the two really popped throughout the opening half hour of “Hardhome.” Peter Dinklage lights up every part of the show that he is a part of and these two sequences suggest nothing different with the mother of dragons’ portion of the show. Daenerys’ arc was always my least favorite part of Dance of Dragons and the infusion of Tyrion into the fold on the show is a very welcome touch.

• Cersei’s imprisonment is also working in a very good fashion and being bit by the hand that she thought would feed her is a great arc for her as the show progresses. While it’s hard to not rout against Cersei for all the chaos that she has caused the show has done a wonderful job of making her captors almost equally as terrible which creates a nice quandary for viewers.

That’s it for me for this week! As I said earlier this has been a pretty awesome season of the show and “Hardhome” has been its crowning achievement. I’m hoping to write a bit about the final two episodes over the next two weeks but it honestly depends on what the work schedule looks like and how quickly I am able to see the coming episodes.

That’s just me though. What did everyone else think?