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The first weeks of January can be tough on all of us, so we decided to kick off our 2019 with a dose of warm hearted cinematic comfort food. That being said, Inside Out kind of put us through it – like the best Pixar movies, there’s a deceptively powerful undercurrent of sadness beneath the shiny exterior.
It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Sadness is quite literally a character in this movie, which imagines the inside of a young girl’s head as a sort of Star Trek-esque control room manned by five core emotions. The de facto leader of this group is Joy, voiced to perfection by Amy Poehler, who must team up with her least-favourite colleague when the trauma of a cross-state move threatens to plunge their host Riley into an emotional shutdown.
This relatively simple premise is built around some surprisingly complex themes which the movie doesn’t shy away from – this is probably the only children’s movie you’ll ever hear casually throwing around the phrase ‘non objective fragmentation’ during a cute animated bit about abstract thought. It’s debatable how much the underlying theme of the melancholy experience of approaching maturity would resonate with younger viewers, but from the perspective of two slightly hung-over adults watching on a cold January evening, Inside Out is pretty much a masterpiece.
In this episode, we discuss the voice cast we’d like to imagine commandeering our own heads, compare notes on the scenes that made us cry the hardest (dammit, Bing Bong…) and get into a surprisingly fierce debate about the emotional makeup of cats, before pitching our own fantasy sequels for the movie.
Along the way we also suggest some potential Inside Out drinking games, revive the Friends game for the first time in 2019 and share some of the funniest, darkest and most creative submissions we received from our loyal listeners. You can tune into the show right now using the links at the top of the blog post, or by searching ‘Beyond The Box Set’ on your preferred podcatcher.
We release a new show every Friday morning, so if you enjoy this episode please hit subscribe to hear more. If you really like us, we’d also love a rating or review. You can also become a VIP listener on Patreon to access incentives such as our exclusive bonus movie review show Beyond BTBS, and we have merchandise available on TeePublic.
Next week, we hit episode 99 with an action-comedy classic courtesy of the ever-inventive, possibly slightly problematic James Cameron. Until then, happy listening and never, ever put broccoli on a pizza!