Dull and facile, easily one of the worst Pixar shorts; and as much as I like their features those are not hallowed grounds.
The only Pixar movie I think I liked more was WALL-E, but while that matches the novelty and ingenuity, I don't think it has the level of insight or the emotional force of Inside Out. Certainly the most gorgeous and mature film to come out of Hollywood in recent memory, and probably hit too close to home, even down to the real-world protagonist moving to San Francisco. I'm not even that hot on the animation style, but this blew me away.
I'd had a number of false starts with this, and expected it to be a slog, but after the first 15 minutes or so it's non-stop entertainment. Groovy special effects, some dated in a bad way, mostly still awesome. The storyline isn't anything better than the average TOS episode, which this was obviously a huge influence on, but somehow the overall quality is a lot higher than that. 50s scifi divides pretty decisively for me into great and awful categories, and this fits cleanly into the former.
Boy, think how much more exciting going to the movies would be if any other mainstream director filmed things like Mann. I'm glad I came back to this; I can certainly understand why I found it offputting when I saw it as a kid in theaters, but this is great directing. Pretty weak story, only the most cursory nods at the Crockett/Tubs relationship, but based entirely on style and on the Farrell/Li relationship this is quality neonoir. I've been sleeping on Gong Li too, great femme fatale performance.
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