Just saw it. I enjoyed it a lot but don’t agree with the praise I’ve seen in some reviews that called it the best thing Pixar has ever done. I also didn’t find it as moving as some others have. I am wondering if having children of your own makes a difference. I don’t and a lot of people who talked about crying during it do.
I must say, I did appreciate the theme of the movie: that it’s not only okay to be sad sometimes but necessary.
Absolutely! I’m looking forward to when the movie comes out on video and that scene makes it to YouTube. 
Damn, left when the credits rolled cause the little one had to pee.
I might be a lonely island, but it didn’t do much for me. And I do have kids. I liked the Lava short and the cat. The rest of it was pretty meh for me.
Pixar movies have a tendency to fall apart completely in the third act…this one stayed true to that unfortunately.
Good set up, interesting middle…“hmm, I guess we have to wrap this up now” final act.
I agree that Sadness came off as annoying in some scenes, but my impression was that it was because Joy was trying to repress her. I’m not sure how much of a spoiler this all is, but Riley was trying hard to be positive about the move and her mother even asked her to be upbeat. That’s why I took the whole thing as a metaphor. Even though the emotions were represented as characters with individual thoughts and opinions, they were actually acting the way they were because that’s what Riley thought they should be doing. A lot of it was unconscious but it was still under Riley’s direction or thinking. She wanted to try to be a “good girl” so Joy tried to keep Sadness from doing its job. Every once in a while Sadness would try to bubble up against Riley’s wishes, and that’s when Sadness would start to touch a core memory and then say, “I don’t know why I did that” when Joy would yell at her to stop it.
I think the point was Sadness seemed to mess up because everything was seem through Joy’s eyes so Sadness seemed unnatural and wrong. The core of the movie was Sadness is just as natural as Joy is and can even be a good thing in some ways.
Joy was always actively sending Sadness away or trying to set her aside, putting her in a “sadness circle,” giving her busy work to keep her from doing anything that Joy didn’t want her to do, and taking the memory marbles away from her. When Sadness talked to Bing-Bong about his disappointment at being forgotten by Riley, Joy chastised her for making him feel worse but he actually felt better after he talked to Sadness and got his sad feelings off his chest.
I think that was the turning point of the movie: Joy still couldn’t understand Sadness (I don’t think she was actually capable of understanding her), but at that moment, she realized that even though she couldn’t understand her, what she did still had value.
This is kind of random but one thing I forgot to mention is a liked how the main characters in the Head seemed to have the texture of Muppets.
A nice movie but not one of Pixar’s best efforts. For me: first tier far and away is The Incredibles. Next tier:* The Toy Story* movies. Third tier: This movie, Monsters, Inc (which it is very similar to), Finding Nemo, etc. Fourth tier: Up, Wall-E, etc. Fifth tier: Ratatouille, etc. Then the crap: Cars, etc.
So: slightly better than above average for them.
Some amazing animation. But the layout of the innards of the brain are idiotic and then some. “Lands”??? Why so few? What are they used for? Why the tiny long bridges to HQ? A lot of stuff like that which wasn’t planned out well.
Saw right away the possibility of two return routes to HQ that were ignored for the longest time before they were tried out. Don’t know why they were introduced and then far later exploited. I don’t think kids can hold the connection that long.
Lots of amazing animation details. E.g., a glitter explosion that must have represented a mammoth amount of rendering time.
Lewis Black could have been used better. Phyllis Smith was perfect. The rest were pretty generic. There was just waaaay too much screen time devoted to Joy and she wasn’t that interesting.
Regarding the Goelz/Oz character switch, keep in mind:
They kept arguing about who had whose hat. The label inside the hat was confusing.
I kept waiting for The Big Crying Moment I heard about. Never happened. Some kids in the theater got scared a few times and needed their mommies, but nothing else seemed to be happening around us.
When the best bits are during the closing credits, you need to rethink your film.
The volcano short sucked big time. Crappy song and just dragged on and on. One of the worst things Pixar has ever done. Should stick to Luxo Jr. type shorts.
As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I loved the movie–thought it was one of their best. But I agree with you about the volcano short. I’m not really sure why so many people are going on about how fantastic and emotional it was. I was just waiting for it to be over.
Apparently that fuzzy texture was a big challenge for the software.
Yeah, I didn’t think the volcano short was terrible, but it was probably my least favorite of the Pixar shorts and I got bored with it before it was over. The animation didn’t strike me as anything innovative, it was too long for the very simple story, the song eventually became annoyingly repetitive, and the whole thing was based on a pretty weak pun (love/lava).
Had it been a couple of minutes shorter I probably would have enjoyed it more.
I like that, in the end, they implied that humans are not beings with singular emotions, and one is not more important than another, and demonstrated this subtlety, showing the balls with mixed colors, and didn’t state it overtly, letting the audience figure it out for themselves. Quite complex for an animated feature obviously targeting young persons. It was not just a typical Disney, Pixar, light-hearted romp. I won’t watch animated features such as “Minions,” which is just an attempt to entertain children with silliness. I applaud “Inside Out” for it’s layers of complexity, recognizing that humans, even children, are deeper than the perceptions which label them.
What I really liked about the movie was it’s potential to explore mental illness. And of course that moves it out of the realm of having kids in the audience. But as an adult I think it would be interesting to use most of the metaphors in the movie to explore schizophrenia or bipolar, for example. They already did a pretty good job showing depression (apathy, anyone?).
And I too, hated the Lava short. I don’t know if it was because I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind to welcome it or what, but I felt that it was overly emotionally manipulative, sappy and inane.
Not necessarily. Kids suffer from mental illness, too, and it could be quite helpful to have that sort of a model to explain to a kid what’s going on in their head.
The volcano short is weird because somehow they managed to stick to the tired trope of fat ugly guy and hot skinny woman in a story about VOLCANOS.
The volcano short would have been better if it had ended with the old volcano sinking unheard behind the back of the young volcano now singing his song. It would have been bitter-sweet with him knowing his message had been heard, her not knowing where the message had come from, but still carrying on with the message.
Instead it felt like they tacked on the happy ending to appease some test audience that found it to be a downer.
Just want to put this here…
Strange Synthesis of Inside Out
That’s the link to an NPR story that agrees with me about my arguments on the movie that I laid out upthread.
So someone agrees with me! I’m not alone anymore! woooo
ETA: At least until it gets to the gender stuff…that’s bullshit