The magic of Pixar tempted me to pay to watch an animation, for the first time in decades. The cinema was packed, and some of the kids looked about four years old. I know people claim that these sorts of films are for adults too, but they're wrong. The target audience of almost every film is the same as the protagonist, in this case an 11 year old girl called Riley, who like all animated characters has eyes the size of lemons.
The action takes place inside the girl's head, where the control tower is manned by the five emotions of Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust. This references the theory that all human cultures have six basic facial expressions (Surprise gets left out). It's a bit odd that these emotions are in charge, I would have thought they were subconscious automated responses, and the actual control centre of the brain should be somewhere else. Perhaps with those little aliens in the Eddie Murphy film Meet Dave.
Sometimes you see into other people's heads. They have their own version of the five emotions, with a different one at the controls. For the little girl Joy is mostly in charge, but we see the value of the other emotions too, in particularly sadness. It's a bittersweet story.
We get a strange and colourful tour of the brain. At the end of each day the memories are shifted from short to long-term, and the Dream Production team puts on a performance complete with reality filter to make it seem real. There's clowns lurking in the subconscious, a graveyard of old childhood memories, and caretakers who destroy old memories that aren't needed any more ("Phone numbers? She's got them all on her cell now."). Most of it seems loosely based on neuroscience, though I'm not convinced by the personality islands and core memories.
Hearing someone's innermost thoughts is always entertaining, and this film had plenty of that. It was an enjoyable film, with some well thought out moments.
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