Inside Out Gets Big Laughs And Tears At CinemaCon The year 2015 should be a rather big one for the folks at Pixar. After being absent from the big screen in 2014, the animation giant is coming back in a major way in the next few months with not just one, but two theatrical releases. But while The Good Dinosaur won’t be hitting theaters until the fall, today saw the first ever screening of Inside Out for attendees at the annual theater owners expo known as CinemaCon.
Walt Disney Pictures held their special presentation earlier today at the Las Vegas-based convention, and after showing the recently-released trailers for Ant-Man, Tomorrowland, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, director Pete Docter and producer Jonas Rivera came on stage to introduce their brand new film - which will be playing at the Cannes Film Festival next month. Docter got the crowd warmed up by explaining how the movie was inspired by the development of his young daughter, who seemed to undergo a serious emotional change when she turned 11. From there, Inside Out was crafted to be about the various emotions that exist inside all of us - Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader), and Disgust (Mindy Kaling) – and how they change within the mind of an 11-year-old girl name Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) who is forced to move with her family from her home in Minnesota to San Francisco.
While I’m sadly temporarily embargoed from expressing and sharing my own personal review of the movie, I will say that the movie got an absolutely wonderful reception from the crowd of theater owners and individuals from the press. The movie being armed with some truly fantastic voice talent in the principal cast, rarely did a single comedic line or moment come and go without some kind of reaction from the audience – ranging from small chuckles to uproarious laughter. But Pixar has a long established reputation of bringing much more than just jokes to their movies, and it’s only fitting that the film caused the crowd to experience a wide range of emotions. I will probably long remember this Inside Out screening if not just because of the number of sniffles I heard echoing around Caesar’s Palace’s Colosseum, and the number of people I glimpsed wiping tears from their eyes.
Various chatter overheard walking out of the theater only further confirmed the powerful response that Inside Out managed to elicit from the masses at CinemaCon – and surely the people at Pixar are excited to evoke the same response from general movie-goers when the film is finally released. We’ll just have to have to wait and see how it all shakes out when the movie comes out in theaters domestically on June 19th.
