From the blubbering young man in the eighth row at that Pixar movie:
I'm not sorry. Let me explain.
Told through the voices and emotions in her head -- Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness -- Inside Out follows an 11-year-old girl, Riley, who moves from Minnesota to San Francisco after her dad takes a new job. Directed by Pete Docter, who also directed Monsters, Inc. and Up, the movie beautifully tackles the experience of being an uprooted kid. It does an even better job deconstructing philosophical elements of our daily lives.
It's goofy, it's sincere, and after about 10 minutes I stopped looking at it as a children's movie and viewed it as what it was: another movie for us early 20-somethings, Pixar's target audience since 1995.
I'm 22. (I'm writing this on my 22nd birthday.) Like a lot of my cohorts, I'm in a sort of limbo. We're not really adults, we don't have a degree or a real job yet. But we're not kids any more. Half our time in college is spent either worrying about (or doing everything in our power to prevent) the future from arriving. In nine months I'll be out of college, searching for a job. Standing in a grocery aisle near you wondering if the $2.99 strawberry jelly fits my budget.
We all grew up on Pixar. Which is exactly why there are a slew of us in the movie theater, weeping.
Sheriff Woody Pride from Toy Story and its sequels was our first friend, Dory from Finding Nemo our first comedian and Randall from Monsters, Inc. our first villain.
I dragged around a Woody doll as a kid and even wrote "Christopher" on the boot instead of Andy.
In elementary school, sleepovers usually included one of two movies: Star Wars or The Incredibles. In third grade, knocking heads and saying "noggin, duuuuude" like the turtles in Finding Nemo was comedy gold.
In high school, after I saw Up I realized I wanted nothing more than to be Carl and find my Ellie and be continuously searching for adventure. My senior year of high school, my friends and I went to see the midnight premiere of Toy Story 3. Afterward, over 2 a.m. IHOP pancakes, we each realized we were all Andy leaving our toys and our childhoods behind to go to college.
Pixar has been appealing to my audience the entire time. Inside Out is no different.
The premise of the movie is based on Joy and Sadness getting sucked up into the recesses of Riley's brain after the move to San Francisco. Riley becomes driven by Fear, Anger and Disgust and all but loses herself in the process.
Her "core" memories begin to evaporate, and Riley begins to lose who she is. Her goofy side drops off, her love of hockey gets shaken, and the entire time I was watching this movie, I couldn't help but think about my life.
Who was I as a kid? What have I lost from that time? What memories do I not recall that could bring me solace on a bad day? What bad days have I re-remembered as good days to protect myself? Pixar has this way of acting as a mirror and pointing the finger back at us and saying, "Who are you now? Who were you then? Who do you want to be?"
And what I realized during the movie was Inside Out gives us the answer to why we of college age still love Pixar: It's a core memory.
Growing up and moving away from home and then moving from college to adulthood kind of sucks. With each stepping stone, you lose a little of who you are. You adapt, but you lose a part of you. In a small way, Pixar is part of our foundation, and by going back to see an animated movie and smell the popcorn and laugh with our friends, we regain a little sense of the selves we've lost.
For a few hours we remember the Woody dolls and sleepovers and when the hardest decision of our day was deciding between peanut butter or cheese and bologna. We forget our iPhones and our Twitter accounts and remember playing with toys on the floor of our room alone, or playing catch with our dad in the backyard before a mac and cheese dinner on a Friday night.
Inside Out makes our changing lives OK. Just like Toy Story 3 made leaving for college OK, just like Finding Nemo made being different OK, Inside Out teaches us life is pointless without sadness -- and sad memories are important, despite their pain. And that's OK too.
So when you go and see it for the first time, or the third time, and you hear sniffles coming from the 22-year-old in the eighth row, you'll know it's because we know. We get it. We get that we're probably too old to like these movies. We know we're closer to being Riley's parents than Riley, and we know the journey we're about to embark on. We know what lies ahead. We just hope Pixar will still be there, helping to make everything OK.
MovieStyle on 07/10/2015