Inside Out ~ Meet the Little Voices Inside Your Head

After spending all day Tuesday waiting out #TSBill, the rain cleared just enough for me to go brave minor flooding and meet up with a friend for a girl's night out. Our film of choice: Fathom events presentation of Insider Access to Disney Pixar's Inside Out. Not only would we get to watch the long awaited Pixar film, but enjoy a behind the scenes tour of the Pixar studios. It's always nice to get some girl time and getting to view the latest Disney film uninterrupted was a real treat.
As a Disney/Pixar fan, the tour before the film was worth the fathom ticket pricing.



Meet the Little Voices Inside Your Head!

Inside Out SPOILERS warning!!!
If you don't want any spoilers, go watch the movie (bring Kleenex!) then come back.


Joy is not the first Pixar character that made me both laugh and cry.
(Frankly, between Up and Finding Nemo and Toy Story 3, the mere sight of the Pixar logo is something of a warning sign for me to double up on the Kleenex.)
Inside Out is the first Pixar movie to blatantly play with your head and jerk around your emotions.

Totally a thing.

Actually, I guess the emotions are Riley's.
The whole premise of Inside Out is that young Riley is born with one emotion, Joy, followed a few seconds later by sadness. Each new emotion helps Riley and is part of her. Disgust shows up to protect a high chair bound Riley from the dangers of broccoli. Fear protects her as a rambunctious toddler from the imminent danger of tripping and lava floors. Anger kept life just and fair. Joy never really found out the purpose of Sadness, but Joy does her best to suppress Sadness and keep her away from the controls and core memories.
Through the drama associated with working in headquarters, Joy and Sadness accidentally get dumped into the maze of long term memory and must learn to work together (with some help from her childhood imaginary friend) to get Riley's core memories back up to headquarters before Fear, Disgust and Anger run away with Riley entirely.
And this is where things get really Pixar.
Mixed emotions, trains of thought and the subconscious? Joy is clearly not in Kansas anymore. There are moments of this movie that made me ugly mom cry.
When Joy is rescued from the Abyss?
Yeah.
Total waterworks.
Never mind at the end of the film when Joy and Sadness create the first mixed emotion as Riley is reunited with her parents. I think that is when I realized why the movie feels so melancholy. It is a movie about putting childish ways behind. About how growing and refining emotions change us in ways we don't quite expect.

Should I take my kids?
The mom in me was torn between two opinions.

• I want to take my children to see this movie today when it opens, (if only because this movie builds a bridge to discuss  how our emotions shape us). It is a beautiful, funny, real way to look at life. If you took Cranium Command, from back in the days of the Wonders of Life pavillion at Epcot, added a dash of tongue in cheek humor and coated it in the serious nature with which children view their world, you'd be hard pressed to replicate the magic of this film.

and

• I want to protect them from the inevitable sadness that overly sensitive children will feel when watching this movie. The imaginary friend from Riley's childhood who rescues Joy from the Abyss does not make it out of the Abyss himself. Sadness and Fear and Disgust are approached as real emotions and that means Riley is really sad, fearful and disgusted.

and

• Why is it PG? "Mild thematic elements and some violence."
  I'd like to point out, for the record that Big Hero 6, Frozen, Wreck-It Ralph, Brave, Tangled and even Planes: Fire & Rescue are rated PG.
  Compared to Monsters University, Cars 2, Winnie the Pooh and Toy Story 3 which received a G rating. I personally feel that Toy Story 3 is a much darker more frightening film.

In the end I will be revisiting Inside Out later this weekend and taking my husband and kids too. In this movie, sadness isn't the villain (actually, there is not a villain). Nor is Sadness purposeless, to be stuffed and sidestepped and avoided.
Sadness helps Riley.
She helps her mourn her losses.
She helps Riley move on and grow.
Without Sadness, Joy wouldn't matter quite as much would she?
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Will you be taking the journey Inside Out this weekend?