Went to see INSIDE OUT -- loved the opening short, a delightful short called LAVA which was magical and charming and funny and moving and imaginative, just one of those magical short films that makes you fall to your knees and say, "Thank God there's a Pixar!"
LAVA was as delightful as the full length film was not.
INSIDE OUT is an oddly unimaginative and unengaging film from Pixar, about what goes on in a little girl's head. Borrowing a notion used to wittier effect in Woody Allen's EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX, Pixar shows us a control console managed by anthropomorphized emotions Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger and Fear who struggle to keep the little girl on an even keel during some frankly low level trauma: her family relocates from Minnesota to San Francisco and she's kind of bummed about it. There's the occasional bit of Pixar magic, no doubt (side-trips into other heads are funny and revealing), but all too often it settles for easy on the nose characterizations and situations (the little red Anger character gets a Hot Head, I mean really, and there's an actual Train Of Thought, with wheels and an engine) and dated unfunny jokes: a slice of vegetarian pizza is blamed on San Francisco in a joke that might have been amusing in 1979, and a reference to bears/gay men falls really spectacularly flat. The story, most unforgivably, is just shocking predictable -- there's never any doubt where the film is going to go and it goes exactly and only there. If only those Pixar standbys Surprise, Wit and Intelligence had gotten to the console in this movie's head, we might have gotten something really interesting, instead of the soggy kiddie-chick movie we're stuck with here.
Boy am I in the minority on this one. But I'm not alone:
Pixar Depression
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." Thomas Pynchon, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick
My blog: http://www.roscoewrites.blogspot.com/