INSIDE OUT

INSIDE OUT. Pete Docter, Ronaldo Del Carmen, dir. and story. Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley, and Pete Docter, script. Ralph Eggleston, production design. USA: Pixar Animation Studios, Walt Disney Pictures (prod.) / Wal Disney Studios Motion Pictures (US and most of Earth, dist.), 2015.

Identified on |IMDb as an "Animation/Comedy/Drama/Film," INSIDE OUT can be seen (and heard) as a cartoon-comic, science-fantasy take on personality theory in the Faculty-Psychology, Freudian-cum-Jungian traditions, combined with more recent and more scientific views on memory and memory's connection to personality and identity. In the tradition of an improv routine Richard D. Erlich thinks he recalls (from Second City?) and definitely from the TV show |Herman's Head (Fox-TV 1991-94), the young protagonist's head, and those around her, is divided into into various faculties, most centrally for Riley, the girl-hero: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust. But whereas Herman's head — his mind — was imaged as a cluttered attic, Riley's head has a Star-Trekkian bridge like that in the "What Happens During Ejaculation" segment of | EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX (BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK) (1972). Significant here, the command center bridge is only the start of literalizations of the figure of speech, "the mechanisms of the mind," and much of what we see juxtapposes a satura of images of things mechanical and electronic on the one hand with, on the other hand, beings figuratively warm, rounded, and (sometimes literally) fuzzy, and in weird animation ways organic and mammalian: usually positive and neutral in terms of the quest of getting Riley's head together, but sometimes threatening.

Either complexly nuanced in a manner decorous in comedy or maybe just confused (which can also have comedic decorum), INSIDE OUT deals with intellect and imagination, abstract thought — which can be a prison — and a "train of thought," which is, of course here, a literal train, and the best way to get from a threatening here to a desired there. This is a family film, with Family as a crucial good, with materials way over the heads of most in the audience the first time through but highly important in a critically and commercially successful film that will have a large audience of children and will introduce them to significant SF tropes on a complex, dynanic relationship among organism, "mechanism," and the mental. Machinery in many senses hasn't invaded the human mind in INSIDE OUT, but is a way to view and just is the mind.

(INSIDE OUT is also important viewing for those interested in gender representation in films ca. 2015, especially films viewed by a whole lot of kids.)

RDE, 22/VI/15