This is not so much a post as a public service announcement
(of sorts).
There are plenty of people who’ve written reviews of the
movie, so there’s no need to repeat here what has already been said well. I will not review
the movie, in the sense of talking about what it is about, but simply observe
that it is funny, suspenseful, and even tear-jerking. It is largely non-offensive—it would have
been completely so in another era, when one could have been sure that certain jokes
were just that—just jokes, and not
reflections of a corroded culture. As matters stand, it was still quite funny, and sufficiently innocent that I didn't feel scandalized.
Inside Out also
has the virtue of quotability. This was
driven home to me with particular force since I saw it back-to-back (i.e., in
the same week) with Jurassic Park
(the original, of course). While both
movies have their strengths, it was Inside
Out that kept leaping to my tongue over the days that followed, providing
opportunities for the exercise of garden variety wit, and even prompting little
moments of recognition. Oh, that’s what I’m doing now, I would think, recalling the antics of the
little people. This did not happen with
the dinosaurs.
In contrast to Brave,
the last Pixar movie I saw in theater, Inside
Out played particularly well. The
most striking improvement (one which also puts Inside Out leagues ahead of that icy debacle recently concocted by
Disney) is in the crafting of the plot.
Plots are, allegedly, one of the things Pixar does best; and part of my
dissatisfaction with Brave (as I
remember it now) came from a sense of frustration with the storyline and its
pacing. Things happened to keep the
movie going—there were twists and such, and they worked plausibly well given
the characters and setting established—but the whole didn’t feel organic. It seemed as if the scriptwriters had taken
fairy tale tropes and grafted them onto the sort of story that they wanted to
tell, or as if they had captured a fairy tale in the wild, and then released
their own story into the cage to fight with it.
Anyway, good things got eaten, leaving us with a distressing
microchimera of a movie.
It may be that this is inevitable when modern scriptwriters
aim to do “a fairy tale in the tradition of Hans Christian Andersen and the
Brothers Grimm.” (The quote is
attributed to director Brenda Chapman in a variety of web articles.) A good story can only handle so many themes
at once—probably, a truly good story can only have one real theme, with others
perhaps aligning with in it subsidiary fashion.
(Paging Dorothy Sayers to read us The
Mind of the Maker here.) Since the kind
of things with which fairy tales concern themselves are not usually the things
on the mind of the modern movie director mother, the resultant mix of
traditional imagery and modern messaging can produce thwarted expectations on
the part of the audience.
In contrast, Inside
Out plants itself squarely in the midst of a very modern kind of fantasy
world, populated by imaginary characters who read newspapers; wear glasses bow-ties, and mascara; and
operate consoles. The modern conception
of how the mind and its emotions function is embodied in distinctly modern
tropes, types, and tones, from the Valley girl resonances of Disgust to the
nervous nerdiness of Fear. By attempting
to ground these characters, their activities, and their environment in modern
brain science, the writers committed themselves to something that most of them
probably believed in and felt was worth adhering to as a system—a respectful
approach, one which most would probably not consider to be necessary or even
appropriate when working with fairy tales.
(I might beg to differ, but that would be another post.) The effect, once again, is to create a
pleasing degree of cohesion throughout the film. As I said before:
That is all.
P.S. Don’t judge the whole movie based on the short at the
beginning. It is … special. Special, as in Jack-Jack’s “special
needs”.
As in, you know, fire extinguishers.
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