‘Inside Out’ An Inside Look At Emotional Turmoil

After taking the Cannes Film Festival by storm this year, even though it was out of competition, Pixar’s Inside Out is already being hailed as a new Pixar blockbuster.

Comedian Lewis Black, who voices Anger in the film, said that the film is “one of the most extraordinarily creative projects” he has ever worked on. Mindy Kaling, who voices Disgust, says working with Inside Out‘s director Pete Docter is a “dream come true” since she is a huge fan of the director’s other Pixar venture, Up. Regardless of who does the talking, though, one idea seems universally accepted when it comes to Inside Out: it is poised to become another in a long string of Pixar hits.

The movie was inspired in part by the mood swings of Docter’s then 11-year-old daughter Elie, and also pays tribute to the old-style cartoons of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. Inside Out looks at 11-year-old Riley, a happy girl until she learns that she is being uprooted to move to San Francisco with her family. From there, the audience gets a look at five emotions – Disgust, Joy, Sadness, Anger and Fear – that are at the control panel of Riley’s mind. Things go painfully awry, though, when Joy and Sadness get sucked into the section of Riley’s head where the core memories are contained. Needless to say, the ensuing action between Joy, Sadness and the other emotions create a significant amount of emotional upheaval in Riley’s preteen mind.

It’s anticipated that, like its predecessors, Inside Out will make hundreds of millions in worldwide box office ticket sales, not to mention the DVD and Blu-Ray sales. What makes Inside Out so unique, though, is the intimate view of emotions, particularly from the perspective of a preteen girl’s emotions themselves. The emotional voyage through adolescence – particularly through such a life-changing event as a move – is something that many in the Pixar audience can connect with. Certainly, the different emotions that Riley ends up feeling throughout the movie are feelings that individuals have all connected with in one way or another.

Certainly, audiences are raving about the film, and are becoming quite reflective about their experiences watching it. It would appear that Inside Out is not just about the emotional voyage of a preteen girl; it is about the emotional voyage that we all go through when we endure any sort of significant event.

Like many of Pixar's finest moments, Inside Out is about the passage of time through a life & of a life through time. http://t.co/7obrl7q0kC

— Dana Stevens (@thehighsign) June 18, 2015

To be sure, there are a lot of events throughout the Pixar canon that audiences have connected to throughout its decade and a half existence, but Inside Out seems to have redefined the emotional voyage that Pixar takes its audiences on. When it opens June 19, it will kick off an outstanding array of films anticipated from Pixar between now and 2017. Inside Out is the tip of the iceberg; over the next year and a half, audiences will be treated to films like The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory and Toy Story 4. It’s a good time to be a Pixar fan.

(Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)