Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Inside Out
2015 · Pete Docter · Inside Out on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the light Joy throws onto floors, walls and other characters. (light)
Kim White builds Joy as an actual lamp. Where Poehler's character stands, the room warms. When she leaves a space, the gold leaves with her and blue creeps in.
Payoff: The lighting tells you who is running the room before anyone says so.
Notice how Riley's San Francisco is framed loosely, her mind symmetrically. (camera)
Patrick Lin shoots the house and school with longer lenses, shallow focus and a slightly handheld looseness. Headquarters gets wide lenses, centered staging, high key, full saturation.
Payoff: Two ways of shooting keep two stories separate, so you always know which one you are in.
Listen for the hum and echo inside Headquarters, gone in Riley's apartment. (sound)
Ren Klyce gives the mind reverb and a low machine drone, like an under-funded office building. Riley's world is close, dry and ordinary. The emotions' bodies carry a soft granular fizz.
Payoff: Your ears can tell inside from outside with your eyes shut, which is how the film keeps its rules clear.
Listen to Phyllis Smith's slow flat voice against Amy Poehler's fast one. (performance)
Smith drags every line downward, unhurried and deadpan. Poehler pushes, manages, interrupts. The gap is funny first, then starts to feel like a problem with Joy rather than Sadness.
Payoff: The comedy of the mismatch is also the argument: relentless cheer is the thing that stops working.
Watch the glowing colored balls: gold, blue, red, purple, green. (setting)
Each orb takes the color of whichever emotion last handled it. Eggleston pushes those five colors out into the shelves, the walls, the whole palette. The orbs can be sorted, dropped and recolored.
Payoff: The film makes the past into an object you can pick up, which means it can also be changed.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the colors. Every orb, wall and face takes its color from whichever emotion is standing closest.