Inside Out and Anomalisa: What We Think About When We Think About Animated Movies

Given that Hayou Miyazaki sent a shockwave through American animation and the way Pixar and Disney have been influenced by him, it’s a little silly to think there could be any more movement in the animation genre here. But over the years, there has been. Some of it has been noticed, but some hasn’t. How many people even saw The Congress where Ari Folman blended animation with live action for a crazy kind of abstract vision of the future. The Congress went mostly ignored by ticket-buyers but what it was aiming for was interesting.

Inside Out is that rare film that hits both the snooty critics and mainstream audiences. It has earned $356 million. As a Pixar movie. With a female protag. All of that talk about how animated films with female characters could not connect. (Doubts already dispelled by last Frozen two years ago). The thing about gender, though, is that our ideas about it are shifting ever so slightly. Most of us adults aren’t really paying attention to how fluid the notion of gender is becoming to younger generations, so that you can’t really be certain about those “rules” that say there has to be a male lead. More than that, by making Riley female, it adds a kind of complexity you could only have if your male character could be a little more flexible with gender. For instance, Riley plays hockey. She isn’t a typical “girly girl” although that’s very much a part of her inner world too – sparkly ponies, hot teen idols, rainbows and imaginary friends all occupy various parts of her inner world. The creators of Inside Out also gave her traces of “anger” usually reserved for boys, and didn’t just populate her inner emotions with female personas. Sure, her Joy and her Sadness are notably different kinds of females but there is so much else going on inside that young girl’s head clearly the writers were freer with how they set about defining that inside.

One of the defining scenes in Inside Out, among many, is the death of Bing Bong. It isn’t just the way the scene plays – singing the song that powers the rocket that will help Joy come back to the surface – it’s the beautifully imaginative way they filmed that cavernous place where memories die. It is the eerie silence of that place of transition that makes the scene so moving. I’ll never forget Birth Movies Death’s Devin Faraci on Inside Out when he said that the stakes were higher in Inside Out because it mattered more what was going on inside her head, how she was changing, what she stood to lose, than any of the silly fake conflicts most movies invest in. The great thing about the film Inside Out is that it takes something so seemingly commonplace and inconsequential — the shift from girlhood to puberty — and turns it into a movie where the stakes are so high it almost feels as though the world could come to an end.

And yes, for 11-year-old Riley, any budding sexuality is left out of Inside Out because it has to be. That was where my own mind immediately went. It is as important to our inner workings as anything but there is no way Disney or Pixar could go there and have families see the film and that’s really the point of making a Pixar movie, right?

Sexuality, however, is front and center with Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s one-of-a-kind exquisite Anomalisa. If Pixar’s reinvented itself with the simple shift of making their lead character female, Anomalisa has taken the stop-motion animation genre and reinvented it with this universe of human dread played out on these tiny handmade dolls — a process so painstaking they could only film two seconds per day. Each gesture, word, action, fear, desire, stumble, laugh, blink had to be done by human hands. That they could have made such a cohesive, immersive story out of that, with real actors driving the thing, is a cinematic miracle. Perhaps it’s because they started not with the animation idea but with the story – it’s Kaufman’s read-aloud play, with actors who knew the piece already, who had done the required work to get their characters just right, that makes Anomalisa such a rich and satisfying experience, even though it’s animated – especially BECAUSE it’s animated.

Anomalisa doesn’t rob actors of jobs. In fact, it gives new life to actors we haven’t seen or heard much from – like Tom Noonan, brilliant as “everyone else.” David Thewlis and poor old Michael Stone, and of course, the off the charts spectacular vocal performance of Jennifer Jason Leigh who gives us the chance to hear her, to go inside of who she is and what she can do as an actress without necessarily needing to see her face. Why is that not considered real acting?

Anomalisa was a film crowdfunded by Kickstarter because it had to be. It was powered by faint fumes of hope from Duke Johnson and Rosa Tran who saw what it could be and made it happen. They could see it already because they heard Kaufman’s play. Thus, when Kaufman and Johnson set about directing it it became a matter of honoring Kaufman’s work, purely and honestly. In so doing, it becomes something much bigger than just “an animated movie.”

Both Inside Out and Anomalisa are films driven by the internal worlds of characters wrapped up in breathtaking animation. What you see on the outside enhances the characters and, in both, the female characters are by far the most interesting. They can go hand in hand because in a way they celebrate the complexities that exist inside the female brain, for once. Anomalisa highlights the limitations of the male brain – not in a general way, of course, but in a specific way. It isn’t saying “all men are this shallow” but it is saying look more deeply at women you pass by every day, especially the ones who don’t catch your eye. Just as Inside Out takes us inside Riley’s imagination, Anomalisa gives us at the rare opportunity to see Lisa’s beauty from the inside because we get to know her by listening to her. It is that rare movie you hardly see anymore where how a person looks on the outside is less important to who they are on the inside.

It’s not clear whether either film can make the Best Picture cut. Both seem to have a pretty good chance to do just that, even with five slots of the ballot. As the year comes to its conclusion, it might end up that Pixar does the impossible yet again and gets Inside Out in on a five slot nomination ballot. The same goes for Anomalisa, except that it would be the first stop motion animated film ever nominated for Best Picture.

It goes without saying that these two films are two of the best of the year. They offer audiences the chance to see something new because they both show the internal lives of their female characters. Women are everywhere except on the screen. This year, somehow, that dynamic has shifted. Room, Brooklyn, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Mad Max: Fury Road – they invest in the complexity, rather than the simplicity, of women, from the inside out.