1. It speaks to everyone.
Anyone who has seen the movie will tell you it spoke to them for different reasons. For my mom, the mother of a college graduate, two college students, and a 12 year-old, it was about childhood and growing up. To her, the movie was about a child who is finally seeing her parents as real people, and not the perfect image she had of them in her head; her rose colored lenses have been tainted by the real world.
For others, it is a way of explaining emotions to young children. The movie gives the audience a look into the human mind and its inner workings. Of course, it isn’t scientific in any way, but the funny characters and wonderland that have been created in this film show children that there are all sorts of emotions and personalities that make everyone unique.
For me, the movie was partly about explaining a young girl's brief struggle with depression. The main character, an 11 year-old girl named Riley, becomes depressed after she is forced to move from Minnesota to California because of her father’s work. The movie shows what it looks like in the mind of someone who is struggling with depression and why what she is feeling is happening.
2. It gives you the feels.
"Inside Out" makes you feel everything. My family and I laughed like maniacs even when no one else was laughing, we gasped when something exciting happened, and we cried as our hearts broke, and laughed again when everything turned out all right. We left the movie theater feeling exhausted by the wide range of emotions we displayed during the hour and a half, and were all the better for it.
3. The animation is spectacular.
You have to see this movie in 3D, there is no other option. The colors are so vivid and the detail to the characters and the scenery is exceptional. I felt as though I were really in the mind of this young girl and surrounded by all of her bright memories and emotions. The wonderland the creators of "Inside Out" constructed in the human brain is truly remarkable.
4. Amy Poehler, Mindy Kaling, Bill Hader, and Phyllis Smith.
These fantastic human beings turn their animated characters into a work of art. Amy Poehler plays Joy in the film, and brings the emotion to life. We tend to think of joy as such a simple feeling, but this movie shows us how much we truly would be lost if we had lost all the happiness and joy in our lives. Poehler does an amazing job bringing Joy to life and giving her emotions of her very own. It can get tough being happy all the time, and Joy shows us that even the happiest of people can have their moments of sadness, and that’s perfectly okay. Sometimes, we need the sadness to remind us how much joy we really have in our lives.
