I didn't like Inside Out, and I'm so confused.
Inside Out is exactly the kind of film I should have liked. It's an interesting premise, the characterisation of emotions is something I've thought about a lot, and Pixar writers are gifted storytellers. I was fully prepared to like it. Actually, I was fully prepared to overidentify with it massively and struggle to communicate for the next two days. Bearing in mind my experience watching Up (where I cried so hard that I really frightened the guy I was on a second date with, and not all of that can be attributed to its being the last film in an all-night marathon), I bought a box of tissues from the newsagent on the way to the cinema. When we left, I hadn't even opened it, and I cry at everything.
The fact that I didn't like it makes me a bit sad. So many people seem to have found things in this film - lightbulb moments, new ways of looking at and explaining things, minor religious experiences - and I want them too, but I couldn't find them. I've read and watched detailed reviews of this film and I still couldn't find them. Where's my moment of enlightenment, Pixar?
I will say that the animation is excellent and the film is beautifully designed, there are a lot of clever ideas within the script and especially within the smaller jokes and details, and the end sequence with all the different sets of emotions in different heads is genius. But that's not quite enough.
Some of it is definitely my own personal stuff. I'd heard that one of the emotions was Fear, and I went in assuming that that would be what got me. So many times I've felt like fear was driving me from the inside, making me say and do things I didn't like, and I thought it would be a powerful thing for me to see that represented. But then Fear was just a jittery dweeb who was basically superfluous to the entire story and didn't do or say one memorable thing. I feel like Fear has been my core emotion for large parts of my life, and this snivelling powerless nothing character is the complete opposite of my personal experience. But that's just me, and it's a nitpick. More important is that I didn't think the story was very good.
The story for the characters inside Riley's head is that Sadness and Joy are trying to get back to headquarters. And they almost do, and then suddenly whatever they're standing on falls over somehow. You can pull this trick once, but it keeps happening, and somewhere around the time of the Bullshit Rocket I just stopped caring. The journey wasn't compelling enough, and I believe I may have let out a quiet "oh, for fuck's sake" somewhere around the penultimate random obstacle. It didn't help that I didn't like Joy or Sadness (or Fear, as I said, and I still have no idea why they chose "Disgust" as the fifth emotion. I liked Anger) as characters and wanted them both to just shut up.
I could tell where I was meant to cry. I always cry at the places I'm meant to cry, and usually at several places I'm not, but not this time. I didn't care about the characters, I didn't care about their journey. Pixar usually knows how to make me care, but this time I could feel the writers constructing a thing around stuff that usually makes people care. Let's have a heroic sacrifice! Heroic sacrifices are moving, right? (No, I didn't like Bing Bong either, and it's been made clear that this makes me a monster.) And it's weird for me to feel like this, because I always care. I can find a way to care even when the filmmakers haven't put a shred of effort into making me care, because I over-empathise horribly with everything, and I'm so confused by how this film managed to override all of my normal impulses and turn me into that person I've always hated. The "oh, everyone said I would cry, but I just didn't cry" person. Why am I that person now? Stupid film.
The short at the beginning with the sad volcano? That got me.
My partner didn't like Inside Out either, but other than him I've heard maybe one other person mention in passing (before I saw it) that they didn't really like it. I even searched for "I didn't like Inside Out" and only found four things written by people who didn't like Inside Out. Two of them mentioned similar problems to the ones I had, but I still feel very alone on this. Everyone thinks it was brilliant and moving and possibly life-changing, and I wish I'd got to see the film they all saw.
Tell me I'm rubbish. Go on.
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