Movie Review: Inside Out

NOTE!!!!!!!! SPOILERS ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!
READ ON YOUR OWN RISK!!!!!!!!
EXIT IF NOT COMFORTABLE!!!!!!!!

Went to watch Inside Out because I couldnt last Thursday.

Anyway, it was such a heavily researched and scripted animation movie! Perfect star I would say! for its story development and script writing. None of their dialogues are fillers, none of them are nonsensical, they all served as a purpose for the furtherance of the story. 

I think how the movie took "Emotions - Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger, Fear" as the central factor of our cognitive function. Our perception, attention to details, our crafted memories, response and our judgement are closely related to the emotions we feel at that point in time. We remember certain events through the lens of our current emotions. When we’re sad, the memory of a family road trip might just remind us of a stuffy car. When we’re happy, we remember the adventures.

The movie took off well, showing how our brain gets more complicated as more emotions come into the story, and how the control grew more functions as we age. Then, it's how we respond to situations based on which dominant emotions we feel, and/or how we generate ideas about it, based on past memories.

Then, the movie introduced us to the system in mind. Memories are forged into balls, and could be retrieved in random times, like the Kiddy Ad Song, and then there are core memories which made personalities. Then, when Riley goes to sleep, everything stopped working, the train of thoughts stopped, the emotions gets to sleep, and interestingly, one emotion would be up for duty. Thats true cuz we tend to go to sleep with certain emotion, depending on the overall satisfaction of the day.

Then there's dream, how certain dream make us jump back to reality at night, and subconscious realm, and ofcoz, the forgotten realm where Ding Dong, the imaginary childhood friend, eventually disappears, seemingly jump off due to its weight, but rather a depiction of how that childhood construct actually helps to push joy into higher grounds.

Then, apart from the psychology works in Riley's head, each emotions have their own attitude too! Joy were always at odds with sadness due to their different philosophy of life. But towards the end, she start to realize that we cant feel joyful without sadness. Every joyful memories of Riley started of her being sad, and then situation changed and she felt better.

It's okay to be sad, and when we're sad, sometimes all we need is the sympathy, or mirror neurons, whatever, to be sad with us too, and we will feel better. So she started to embrace sadness, and crafted more colourful personalities and memories. (at first, the memory balls are single coloured, but now multi, due to the many sides of emotions in one memory).

Joy is also a perfectionist, liked to take control of everything, which of course she does it well, happiness, everyone wants it right? And happiness at times can be rather selfish. And then, Sadness liked to meddle with stuffs, sometimes we feel sad for no apparent reason, we sometimes have random pessimist thoughts, or out attention to details could be directed at the sad part of the situation or memory. We can't really contain sadness, we have to embrace her, we have to make her work for us.

Then, there's the comical scenes of other people's emotion, how the mum and dad interact, how the cat, and random strangers in the street feels. In one scene, which sums up the upheaval of young love in a nutshell, she smiles at a boy whose mind almost short circuits in attraction and terror at the sight of her. I felt all these were depicted so well in the movie! It's really a thinking movie indeed! Not just a mere cartoon!