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.
Once you have seen it
Watch the hockey orb Joy replays late, then its earlier appearance. (structure)
The film shows you the golden hockey image early as uncomplicated happiness. Late, Joy runs it backward and finds Riley alone on a branch first, with her parents arriving because she was sad.
Payoff: The turn is structural. The same picture gets a new meaning, and that is the whole case for sadness being useful.
Count the cuts between three consoles at the dinner table. (cutting)
Nolting rotates Riley's crew, her mother's and her father's, each with different décor and office culture. Exposition, three characterizations and the film's best joke arrive in one editing figure.
Payoff: One cutting pattern teaches you the whole system and makes it funny at the same time.
Watch Headquarters dim as Joy's gold gives way to blue. (light)
The control room starts bright and cluttered with warm light. It cools, darkens and finally goes grey as Riley shuts down. No line of dialogue announces any of it.
Payoff: The drama is written in lamps, so a child watching reads the same information an adult does.
Listen for the moment score and machine hum both drop out. (sound)
At Riley's worst points Giacchino's piano theme stops and Klyce's mind-world noise thins to nothing. The film's loudest decision is a subtraction, and it happens more than once.
Payoff: Silence tells you the machinery has failed, without showing you a broken machine.
Carry this in: Watch the colors. Every orb, wall and face takes its color from whichever emotion is standing closest.