inside out movie review essay

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"Inside Out," a comedy-adventure set inside the mind of an 11-year old girl, is the kind of classic that lingers in the mind after you've seen it, sparking personal associations. And if it's as successful as I suspect it will be, it could shake American studio animation out of the doldrums it's been mired in for years. It avoids a lot of the cliched visuals and storytelling beats that make even the best Pixar movies, and a lot of movies by Pixar's competitors, feel too familiar. The best parts of it feel truly new, even as they channel previous animated classics (including the works of Hayao Miyazaki ) and explore situations and feelings that everyone has experienced to some degree.

The bulk of the film is set inside the brain of young Riley ( Kaitlyn Dias ), who's depressed about her mom and dad's decision to move them from Minnesota to San Francisco, separating her from her friends. Riley's emotions are determined by the interplay of five overtly "cartoonish" characters: Joy ( Amy Poehler ), a slender sprite-type who looks a little bit like Tinkerbell without the wings; Sadness (Phyllis Smith), who's soft and blue and recessive; Fear ( Bill Hader ), a scrawny, purple, bug-eyed character with question-mark posture; Disgust ( Mindy Kaling ), who's a rich green, and has a bit of a " Mean Girls " vibe; and Anger ( Lewis Black ), a flat-topped fireplug with devilish red skin and a middle-manager's nondescript slacks, fat tie and short-sleeved shirt. There's a master control room with a board that the five major emotions jostle against each other to control. Sometimes Joy is the dominant emotion, sometimes Fear, sometimes Sadness, etc., but never to the exclusion of the others. The controller hears what the other emotions are saying, and can't help but be affected by it.

The heroine's memories are represented by softball-sized spheres that are color-coded by dominant emotion (joy, sadness, fear and so forth), shipped from one mental location to another through a sort of vacuum tube-type system, then classified and stored as short-term memories or long-term memories, or tossed into an "abyss" that serves the same function here as the trash bin on a computer. ("Phone numbers?" grouses a worker in Riley's memory bank. "We don't need these. They're in her phone!") Riley's mental terrain has the jumbled, brightly colored, vacu-formed design of mass market toys or board games, with touches that suggest illustrated books, fantasy films (including Pixar's) and theme parks aimed at vacationing families (there are "islands" floating in mental space, dedicated to subjects that Riley thinks about a lot, like hockey). There's an imaginary boyfriend, a nonthreatening-teen-pop-idol type who proclaims, "I would die for Riley. I live in Canada."  A "Train of Thought" that carries us through Riley's subconscious evokes one of those miniature trains you ride at zoos; it chugs through the air on rails that materialize in front of the train and disintegrate behind it.

The story kicks into gear when Riley attends her new school on the first day of fifth grade and flashes back to a memory that's color-coded as "joyful," but ends up being reclassified as "sad" when Sadness touches it and causes Riley to cry in front of her classmates. Sadness has done this once before; she and Joy are the two dominant emotions in the film. This makes sense when you think about how nostalgia—which is what Riley is mostly feeling as she remembers her Minnesota past—combines these two feelings. A struggle between Joy and Sadness causes "core memories" to be knocked from their containers and accidentally vacuumed up, along with the two emotions, and spat into the wider world of Riley's emotional interior. The rest of the film is a race to prevent these core memories from being, basically, deleted. Meanwhile, back at headquarters, Fear, Anger and Disgust are running the show.

It's worth pointing out here that all these characters and locations, as well as the supporting players that we meet inside Riley's brain, are figurative. They are visual representations of ineffable sensations, a bit like the characters and symbols on Tarot cards. And this is where "Inside Out" differs strikingly from other Pixar features. it is not, strictly speaking, fantasy or science fiction, categories that describe the rest of the company's output. It's more like an extended dream that interprets itself as it goes along, and it's rooted in reality. The world beyond Riley's mind looks pretty much like ours, though of course it's represented by stylized, computer-rendered drawings. Nothing happens there that could not happen in our world. Most of the action is of a type that a studio executive would call "low stakes": Riley struggles through her first day at a new school, gets frustrated by her mom and dad pushing her to buck up, storms to her room and pouts, etc.

The script draws clear connections between what happens to Riley in San Francisco (and what happened to her when she was little) and the figurative or metaphorical representations of those same experiences that we see inside her mind, a parallel universe of fond memories, repressed pain, and slippery associations. The most endearing and heartrending moments revolve around Bing-Bong ( Richard Kind ), the imaginary friend that Riley hasn't thought about in years. He's a creature of pure benevolence who only wants Riley to have fun and be happy. His body is made of cotton candy, he has a red wagon that can fly and that leaves a rainbow trail, and his serene acceptance of his obsolescence gives him a heroic dimension. He is a Ronin of positivity who still pledges allegiance to the Samurai that released him years ago.

Written by Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley from a story by Ronnie del Carmen and Pete Docter , and directed by Docter ("Monsters, Inc." and " Up "), "Inside Out" has the intricate interplay of image and sound that you've come to expect from Pixar. It also boasts the company's characteristic, three-leveled humor aimed at, respectively, very young children, older kids and adults, and pop culture buffs who are always on the lookout for a clever homage (a separate class of obsessive). There's nothing quite like hearing a theater packed with people laughing at the same gag for different reasons. A scene where Bing-Bong, Joy and Sadness race to catch the Train of Thought is exciting for all, thanks to the elegant way it's staged, and funny mainly because of the way Poehler, Smith and Kind say the lines. But adults will also appreciate the no-fuss way that it riffs on poetic and psychological concepts, and aficionados of the histories of animation and fine art will dig how the filmmakers tip their hats to other artistic schools. The characters get to Imagination Land by taking a shortcut through Abstract Thought, which turns them into barely-representational characters with smashed-up Cubist features, then mutates them into flat figurines that suggest characters in a 1960s short film by UPA, or an animation company based in Eastern Europe . There are very sly throwaway gags as well, like a character's comment that facts and opinions look "so similar," and a pair of posters glimpsed in a studio where dreams and nightmares are produced: "I'm Falling For a Very Long Time Into a Pit" and "I Can Fly!"

It's clear that the filmmakers have studied actual psychology, not the Hollywood movie version. The script initially seems as if it's favoring Joy's interpretation of what things mean, and what the other emotions ought to "do" for Riley. But soon we realize that Sadness has just as much of value to contribute, that Anger, Fear and Disgust are useful as well, and that none of them should be prized to the exclusion of the rest. The movie also shows how things can be remembered with joy, sadness, anger, fear or disgust, depending on where we are in the narrative of our lives and what part of a memory we fixate on. There's a great moment late in the story where we "swipe" through one of Riley's most cherished memories and see that it's not just sad or happy: it's actually very sad, then less sad, then finally happy. We might be reminded of Orson Welles' great observation, "If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."

The film is even more remarkable for how it presents depression: so subtly but unmistakably that it never has to label it as depression. Riley is obviously depressed, and has good reason to be. The abyss where her core memories have been dumped is also a representation of depression. True to life, Riley stays in her personal abyss until she's ready to climb out of it. There's no magic cure that will make the pain go away. She just has to be patient, and feel loved.

A wise friend told me years ago that we have no control over our emotions, only over what we choose to do about them, and that even if we know this, it can still be hard to make good decisions, because our feelings are so powerful, and there are so many of them fighting to be heard. "Inside Out" gets this. It avoids the sorts of maddening, self-serving, binary statements that kids always hate hearing their parents spout: Things aren't so bad. You can decide to be happy. Look on the bright side. Even as we root for Riley to find a way out of her despair, we're never encouraged to think that she's just being childish, or that she wouldn't be taking everything so seriously if she were older. We feel for her, and with her. She contains multitudes.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Inside Out (2015)

102 minutes

Amy Poehler as Joy (voice)

Mindy Kaling as Disgust (voice)

Bill Hader as Fear (voice)

Phyllis Smith as Sadness (voice)

Lewis Black as Anger (voice)

Kaitlyn Dias as Riley (voice)

Paris Van Dyke as Meg (voice)

Kyle MacLachlan as Dad (voice)

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• Michael Giacchino
• Meg LeFauve

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Inside Out review – an emotional rollercoaster

Pixar returns to form with a dazzlingly imaginative adventure set inside the mind of an 11-year-old girl

T he new Pixar animation Inside Out could easily have been called Out There. It’s as bizarre, imaginative and authentically psychedelic as anything produced in mainstream animation. At this point in the fortunes of the once-infallible creative powerhouse, you wouldn’t have bet on Pixar coming up with anything very outré. Bought by Disney in 2006, the studio hadn’t produced anything truly inspired that wasn’t a sequel since Up in 2009. Given the humdrum quality of Cars 2 and Monsters University and 2012’s well-intentioned but forgettable Brave , it seemed as if the studio had lost its penchant for exotic risk.

But Inside Out is in the top rank of Pixar productions with its combination of audacity, intelligence, wit and emotional reward. Directed and co-written by Pete Docter ( Monsters, Inc and Up ) and co-directed by Ronnie del Carmen, Inside Out starts from a boldly abstract premise: the narrative plays out within the psyche of a girl named Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias) and the film’s characters are her feelings.

At the start, one of those feelings, Joy (Amy Poehler), asks: “Do you ever look at someone and wonder what is going on inside their head?” The next questions that arise are: what might such psychic events actually look like? And how might they generate a story that can be sustained for 102 minutes? Inside Out meets these challenges with an inventiveness that’s appropriately mind-boggling.

The film starts in a dark cavern, the Plato’s cave of the unformed self. As baby Riley is born, Joy spontaneously appears – a shimmering, big-eyed Tinkerbell-like pixie – and observes Riley’s view of the world on a glowing, cloud-like surveillance screen. Joy is soon joined by other emotions – Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger, the latter characterised as a squat red sponge that bursts into flame when provoked. These five monitor Riley’s life and produce her responses by operating a console of levers and buttons, something between the USS Enterprise and PlayStation 4. Inside Out explores much the same premise – little people busy working in your head – as the Beano ’s Numskulls strip, but it’s infinitely more sophisticated and distinctively female-skewed. The film’s real heroine is Joy, a pathologically upbeat micro-manager convinced that only positive feelings count – and Amy Poehler instils Joy with something of the obsessive girl guide eagerness of her Leslie Knope in the TV sitcom Parks and Recreation .

Then crisis comes as Riley, now 11, moves with her parents (Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan) from Minnesota to scary San Francisco, where a new school fills her with anguish and where, worst of all, pizzas come topped with broccoli. The ensuing narrative is set in the far reaches of Riley’s psychic landscape – and it is a landscape. Her trauma triggers the seismic collapse of the “personality islands” – literally, floating landmasses – that define who she is, devoted to such themes as family, friendship and hockey.

A control-room malfunction leaves Joy and Sadness wandering in a vast allegorical geography that includes such landmarks as imagination (a theme park) and the place where dreams are made: a movie studio, of course, where productions range from I’m Falling Down a Very Deep Pit to Fairy Dream Adventure Part 7. In the film’s wildest moment, the wanderers enter a zone of abstract thought, where they are zapped into a series of increasingly simplified geometric shapes, as they – and the film itself – dizzyingly self-deconstruct (“Oh no, we’re non-figurative!”).

Formidably ingenious, Inside Out hits an elusive sweet spot in terms of appealing to children and adults alike. It makes extraordinary use of knowing cuteness, for example. Take Bing Bong, Riley’s long-lost imaginary friend from early childhood, a cat-elephant hybrid made out of candyfloss. Here, the film seems to stray perilously into Jar Jar Binks territory – but while smaller children will warm to Bing Bong as a cuddly oddity, adults and older kids will see something quite troubling in a figure that’s manifestly a primitive creation of the infant mind, poignantly fated to extinction.

It’s in the way that the story depicts the fading of childhood’s mental furniture, and explores the mechanics of forgetting, that Inside Out achieves a universal significance. While specialists may bemoan the simplicity of the film’s mental model, inspired by the “psychoevolutionary” theory of Robert Plutchik, the eventual message – that sorrow is as valuable an emotion as happiness – is delivered with less piety than you might imagine.

As for the visual style, it’s dazzling, flouting CGI’s tendency to photorealism in favour of overt cartoonishness in a 1950s retro vein, together with a refined exploration of light: the emotions are composed of fibrous bundles of luminescence. The running gags are delicious (don’t miss the end credits), and in the best Pixar fashion, Inside Out expertly but uncynically tugs the heartstrings – and indeed, the film’s theme overtly shows you how it’s done. Don’t be afraid to come out of Inside Out wiping a tear from your eye: you can always say: “It was the little people in my head that did it.”

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Review by Brian Eggert June 19, 2015

Ever feel conflicted or behave in a way you normally wouldn’t? Maybe you even hear the voices in your head arguing about what to do next or how to react in a particular situation. And if those voices belonged to actual functionaries within the complex metropolis of your mind, what would they look like? Traditionally, an angel sits on one shoulder and a devil on the other, and together they personify our conscience. But the human mind is much more complicated than a basic good-evil dichotomy. Everyone is a sum of their experiences, memory, and basic (and often not-so-basic) emotions. Such conceptual thoughts are the material of Inside Out , a marvelous animated film that exists almost entirely within the theoretical space inside our heads, operating by abstract rules and an uncanny understanding of human emotion. Returning to form, Pixar Animation Studios explores the high-concept notion of our inner voices in director Pete Docter’s ( Monsters, Inc. , Up ) new film, and delivers one of their most inventive, affecting releases.

The story follows Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias), a tomboyish 11-year-old girl who, along with her parents (Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan), moves from Minnesota to San Francisco. The move comes with no end of unexpected obstacles for Riley, including a long-delayed moving van, a difficult first day at school, a botched hockey tryout, and she even contemplates running away. Although not much happens to Riley on the outside—beyond the not-inconsiderable stress of moving, of course— inside is another story. Within the mission control of Riley’s mind, her behavior and feelings are controlled by five central emotions:  Joy (Amy Poehler), a yellow-glowing bundle of delight; Anger (Lewis Black), a boxy red fella with a fiery temper; Fear (Bill Hader), a purple, panicky master of probability; Disgust (Mindy Kaling), a green socialite; and Sadness (Phyllis Smith), a bespectacled sack of gloom. In Riley’s otherwise pleasant life, Joy commands her fellow emotions as a natural leader, glimmering with positive energy.

But Riley’s mind is a complicated network of departmental structures and libraries of memory. As any emotion may take over at any given moment, the dominant emotion creates a memory orb, each of which glow in the color of the emotion that created it. Hundreds are created every day. Five core memory orbs form Riley’s personality, represented by five islands or centers for her psyche: Family, Friendship, Honesty, Goofball, and Hockey. At her relatively young age, Riley’s psyche is somewhat uncomplicated and will grow more intricate in the future, establishing additional islands. For now, the move has made Sadness a little touchy, in that she’s been touching happy memories and transforming them into sad ones. For example, once-positive thoughts of Minnesota now become aching memories of better times. To counteract Sadness’ sudden contamination of memories, Joy, with Sadness behind her, heads out of the control room and into the wilds of Riley’s mind to set things straight and make Riley happy again. But then, this leaves Anger, Disgust, and Fear in control.

Not everything about Riley is encompassed by these five emotions, as Joy and Sadness soon learn. Outside of the control room, there’s a “train of thought” that appears as a locomotive chugging along on tracks, which appear before it and disappear behind it. Among long shelves of countless memory orbs, workers dispose of fading memories, dumping them into a vast abyss, never to be remembered again. These ingenious concepts and inventions have been articulated within the script by Docter, Meg LeFauve, and Josh Cooley, and visualized by the Pixar staff to wonderful effect. Among the most clever is Bing Bong (Richard Kind), Riley’s imaginary friend who leads Joy and Sadness into a chamber of abstract thought, where they’re broken down, piece by piece, into shapes, two dimensions, and finally, the impression of color. Elsewhere, Joy and Sadness step into Riley’s dream factory, a setup not unlike a movie studio lot; they also venture into her clown-infested unconscious, where her deepest fears are locked away. These ideas may sound complicated, but they’re explained in such a breezy, effortless way that the audience cannot help but instantly grasp them, and more importantly, identify with them.

Of course, Joy attempts to dominate every moment in the service of Riley, denying Sadness every opportunity to resolve the situation. This resourceful metaphor for repression plays out in an imaginative way that only Pixar could conceive, in a mental landscape informed by an 11-year-old mind. By holding up a positive front and denying one’s feelings, the mind becomes a conflicted and crushing place; and if maintained long enough, a person could fall apart. This insightful theme finds an entertaining way to tell viewers, young and old, how to acknowledge their emotions, pleasant or not. Typically unpleasant emotions can be helpful if expressed in the right way, just as positive emotions can be damaging if they deny authentic feelings. What better place to investigate this dynamic than in the confused head of a youngster? More than just exploring the personification of emotions and inner-workings of a mental state, the film also explores the strange and confusing time during the onset of adolescence. (As a result, we can’t help but imagine what an adulthood version of Inside Out might look like.)

Inside Out beautifully transforms emotional conflict into an adventure, a surreal look at the internal machinations that encompass why we feel the way we do. Meanwhile, tender scenes in the real world range from blissful to bittersweet, from tragic to downright devastating. Varying animation styles depict the two worlds as cartoonish and realistic, respectively. And yet, the material retains an accessible emotional center to which young children and adults will identify. Quite refreshingly, Inside Out does not limit its investigation of this concept to Riley. Brief glimpses into her parents’ minds offer a perceptive look at how the mind operates. Consider a funny bit where Riley’s mother remembers a hunky Latino man and, despite loving her husband, her Fear emotion hangs onto that memory, “Just in case.” Riley’s father is guided by a seemingly inept grouping of control room emotions. The best of these asides occurs during the end credits, where Docter takes us into the minds of an insecure teen, a moody pizza place clerk, and even pets (the look into a cat’s mind offers the film’s most gut-busting laugh).

Most impressive is Inside Out ‘s embrace of sadness and melancholy as essential components of a person’s emotional growth. This represents a wholly unique perspective for an animated film, in that most cheery efforts from Dreamworks or Disney resolve to be escapist, bright, overly optimistic larks devoid of real emotional underpinnings. But this film recognizes the need for sadness as a necessity for self-understanding and empathy, for emotional development and maturing. Inside Out challenges the viewer with aching turns in the plot, putting us through the same ringer as Riley. Without sadness, there is no recognition of longing, no artistic yearning, no desire for self-exploration—and this is a film that demands self-exploration out of its audience, beginning with Riley, but lasting long after the film is over. It will change how you think about your feelings, and perhaps even recalibrate how you visualize what’s going on in your head. That Pixar has released a film acknowledging the need to be attuned to your emotional state is a bold testament to their sophistication, not only as an animation studio, but also as storytellers.

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Review: Inside Out

By Michael Sragow in the July-August 2015 Issue

Pixar’s Pete Docter has a genius for spinning imaginative extravaganzas out of mundane materials—kids’ room closet doors in Monsters, Inc. , an old man’s gingerbread house in Up . With Inside Out , he reaches into an 11-year-old girl’s mind and creates a marvelous mental landscape out of visual elements as prosaic as jellybeans and clowns. The movie is both audacious and unpretentious, starting with its heroine, Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias), a Minnesota girl who loves her mom (Diane Lane), dad (Kyle MacLachlan), and ice hockey. She’s a paradigm of American happy-childhood kitsch—or at least that’s how the gal who introduces Riley’s story, Joy (Amy Poehler), desperately wants us to see her.

In a Disney/Pixar first, Joy turns out to be an unreliable narrator who shades reality to fit her temperament. Oh, and one other thing: Joy is not a flesh-and-blood female but the embodiment of an emotion inside Riley’s head. She and four other emotions—Fear (Bill Hader), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Anger (Lewis Black), and Sadness (Phyllis Smith)—govern Riley’s behavior from a Playskool-like control panel in “headquarters.” Or do they? Riley, after all, summons them into being.

Clouds form when Riley’s family moves to a grungy part of San Francisco: the house is dingy, and Dad is distracted by work. But real trouble comes when Riley’s mom says that the women of the house should keep smiling and that Riley should remain her parents’ “happy girl.” In lesser films, that would be a rallying cry. Not here. This breakthrough cartoon attacks enforced happiness and optimism—the white bread and butter of American family movies.

As the action shifts back and forth inside and out of Riley’s head, Docter erects a dizzyingly rich internal architecture. Riley’s memories come in the form of color-coded spheres that roll into headquarters like bowling balls. A few become core memories. Most get sucked into the labyrinth of Long-Term Memory and placed in towering arcades. Nearby, floating Islands of Personality—gimcrack constructions named Hockey and Goofball as well as Family, Honesty, and Friendship—sum up the life of Riley. They crumble when Riley teeters on the brink of losing her identity.

As Joy struggles with Riley’s controls, Inside Out threatens to be a film about emotion rather than a genuinely emotional movie. But Docter generates convulsive comedy and drama. Each emotion has a good and a bad side. Joy, who looks like the daughter of Peter Pan and Tinker Bell, is an inspiration and a master of denial. She insists on keeping Riley happy but also refuses to let her grow up. Anger, a squat red firecracker, energizes but also endangers Riley with his explosive fury at injustice. Disgust, a pouty, emerald mean girl, saves Riley from foul food and faux pas, yet overvalues her fallible taste. Fear, an un-sprung purple coil of a man, protects Riley one moment, paralyzes her the next. Joy undervalues poor blue Sadness as an endomorphic mope—but Sadness is honest and authentic. Without her, Joy learns, happiness no longer makes sense as Riley faces change.

When Joy and Sadness get sucked into Long-Term Memory, the film becomes a thrilling oddball odyssey. At its peak, they survive the minefield of “Abstract Thought.” Have concepts like “nonobjective fragmentation” and “deconstruction” ever been this funny? Have “two-dimensionality” and “nonfigurative representation” ever been so visceral? Viewers will feel catapulted into a phantasmagoric world designed by Bizarro Picasso.

Docter himself resists abstraction: he makes Riley’s inner space equally literal and metaphorical—true to her specific personality. Riley’s fuzzy imaginary friend, Bing Bong (Richard Kind), could have been as annoying as Jar Jar Binks, but instead he becomes the poignant embodiment of a tween girl’s need to give up childish things and embrace Sadness as well as Joy. As an antidote to infantilized mass culture, Inside Out is just what the Docter ordered.

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Oliver Franklin-Wallis

Review: Inside Out is a work of simple genius

Pixar's films, at their best, are wonderful not just for their inventiveness, or humour, or animation, but for how they make you think. Toys coming to life, monsters under the bed, or stories told from the point of view of bugs, fish, cars -- theirs is the stuff of a billion children's overactive imaginations. So it's fitting that Inside Out , the studio's latest, returns to that tradition with its most universal and simple idea yet: going inside the child's mind itself.

Inside Out follows Riley, a 12-year-old girl dismayed when her family packs up and moves from snowy Minnesota to San Francisco. (It's never made explicit, but talk of investors, growing stubble and scruffy T-shirts suggests her Dad works at a tech start up.) All that's slightly beside the point, because we see comparatively little of Riley: the majority of the action takes place inside her mind, which is populated by the effervescent Joy (Amy Poehler), mopey Sadness (Phyllis Smith), hot-headed Anger (Lewis Black), gangly Fear (Bill Hader) and trendy Disgust (Mindy Kaling). Think the Beano 's Numskulls, but brighter coloured. Like the crew of the Enterprise, this fivesome control Riley's thoughts and behaviour, with the ultimate aim of creating memories, little glowing orbs that roll in after each new experience before being whisked off to Long Term or -- in the case of a few formative experiences -- becoming Core Memories, which generate the all-important Islands Of Personality. As a child, Joy is used to ruling the roost, before the dislocation of moving home sets off a crisis, as Joy and Sadness are zapped off into the depths of Riley's mind, leaving only Anger, Fear and Disgust in charge. Has adolescence ever been summed up so neatly?

This introduction is whizzed through in an inventive few opening minutes and remarkable for its clarity and simplicity; director Pete Docter has a history of great openings – his last film was the Oscar-winning Up -- and this is similarly successful in its set-up. From there we're off on a journey through Joy's mind taking in such delights as Imaginationland, Abstract Thought and the caves of the Subconscious. Docter consulted real psychologists on the story , and it shows -- Inside Out 's dealings with complexity of emotion and behaviour is immensely clever, and rarely misses a beat. The script is funny too, ranging from broad slapstick to smarter gags for the adults. But most of all, the film's secret is in its universality, finding delightfully simple gags in the everyday (in a delightful sequence, we discover the reason you can't get that annoyingly catchy tune out of your head).

As with Up however, the real power of Inside Out isn't in its humour, but in its maturity; the second half of the film is much more downbeat, with certain scenes that will leave even the hardest-hearted reaching for tissues. (I can only imagine how devastating it would be if you have kids; Docter was inspired to write the film by his daughter's adolescence, and there's a palpable sense of loss that lingers long afterwards.)

It's not perfect; by modern standards Inside Out is refreshingly lacking any excess, but zipping from scene to scene you're occasionally left wanting more; more jokes, more emotion, more explanation -- particularly during a speedy denouement. (On a minor note, it's also a little tiresome, a week after Ant-Man , to see yet another film set in San Francisco.) It's a shame we're mostly confined to Riley's mind, as when the film does veer inside the heads of others, it finds some of its best moments (it's worth staying for the credits sequence for more of these). You get the feeling there is ample ground there for a sequel.

But ultimately, when the credits roll, and your smiles fade, you can't help but be left with a bittersweet feeling. That's the thing: like childhood, no Pixar film lasts forever.

Inside Out is out now.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK

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Gray Matter

The Science of ‘Inside Out’

By Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman

• July 3, 2015

FIVE years ago, the writer and director Pete Docter of Pixar reached out to us to talk over an idea for a film, one that would portray how emotions work inside a person’s head and at the same time shape a person’s outer life with other people. He wanted to do this all in the mind of an 11-year-old girl as she navigated a few difficult days in her life.

As scientists who have studied emotion for decades, we were delighted to be asked. We ended up serving as scientific consultants for the movie, “Inside Out,” which was recently released.

Our conversations with Mr. Docter and his team were generally about the science related to questions at the heart of the film: How do emotions govern the stream of consciousness? How do emotions color our memories of the past? What is the emotional life of an 11-year-old girl like? (Studies find that the experience of positive emotions begins to drop precipitously in frequency and intensity at that age.)

“Inside Out” is about how five emotions — personified as the characters Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness and Joy — grapple for control of the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley during the tumult of a move from Minnesota to San Francisco. (One of us suggested that the film include the full array of emotions now studied in science, but Mr. Docter rejected this idea for the simple reason that the story could handle only five or six characters.)

Riley’s personality is principally defined by Joy, and this is fitting with what we know scientifically. Studies find that our identities are defined by specific emotions, which shape how we perceive the world, how we express ourselves and the responses we evoke in others.

But the real star of the film is Sadness, for “Inside Out” is a film about loss and what people gain when guided by feelings of sadness. Riley loses friends and her home in her move from Minnesota. Even more poignantly, she has entered the preteen years, which entails a loss of childhood.

We do have some quibbles with the portrayal of sadness in “Inside Out.” Sadness is seen as a drag, a sluggish character that Joy literally has to drag around through Riley’s mind. In fact, studies find that sadness is associated with elevated physiological arousal, activating the body to respond to loss. And in the film, Sadness is frumpy and off-putting. More often in real life, one person’s sadness pulls other people in to comfort and help.

Those quibbles aside, however, the movie’s portrayal of sadness successfully dramatizes two central insights from the science of emotion.

First, emotions organize — rather than disrupt — rational thinking. Traditionally, in the history of Western thought, the prevailing view has been that emotions are enemies of rationality and disruptive of cooperative social relations.

But the truth is that emotions guide our perceptions of the world, our memories of the past and even our moral judgments of right and wrong, most typically in ways that enable effective responses to the current situation. For example, studies find that when we are angry we are acutely attuned to what is unfair, which helps animate actions that remedy injustice.

We see this in “Inside Out.” Sadness gradually takes control of Riley’s thought processes about the changes she is going through. This is most evident when Sadness adds blue hues to the images of Riley’s memories of her life in Minnesota. Scientific studies find that our current emotions shape what we remember of the past. This is a vital function of Sadness in the film: It guides Riley to recognize the changes she is going through and what she has lost, which sets the stage for her to develop new facets of her identity.

Second, emotions organize — rather than disrupt — our social lives. Studies have found, for example, that emotions structure (not just color) such disparate social interactions as attachment between parents and children, sibling conflicts, flirtations between young courters and negotiations between rivals.

Other studies find that it is anger (more so than a sense of political identity) that moves social collectives to protest and remedy injustice. Research that one of us has conducted has found that expressions of embarrassment trigger others to forgive when we’ve acted in ways that momentarily violate social norms.

This insight, too, is dramatized in the movie. You might be inclined to think of sadness as a state defined by inaction and passivity — the absence of any purposeful action. But in “Inside Out,” as in real life, sadness prompts people to unite in response to loss. We see this first in an angry outburst at the dinner table that causes Riley to storm upstairs to lie alone in a dark room, leaving her dad to wonder what to do.

And toward the end of the film, it is Sadness that leads Riley to reunite with her parents, involving forms of touch and emotional sounds called “vocal bursts” — which one of us has studied in the lab — that convey the profound delights of reunion.

“Inside Out” offers a new approach to sadness. Its central insight: Embrace sadness, let it unfold, engage patiently with a preteen’s emotional struggles. Sadness will clarify what has been lost (childhood) and move the family toward what is to be gained: the foundations of new identities, for children and parents alike.

Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Paul Ekman is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco.

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‘inside out’: what the critics are saying.

Riley's emotions — Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness — must navigate new territory after she moves to San Francisco in the family-friendly Pixar film.

By Paulina Jayne Isaac

Paulina Jayne Isaac

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Inside Out  has 11-year-old Riley experiencing of an array of emotions — from Joy ( Amy  Poehler ) to Sadness ( Phyllis Smith ) — after leaving her Midwestern town for life in the Bay Area.

Written and directed by  Pete  Docter  ( Up),  Pixar’s first release in two years is set to earn $60 million in its domestic debut , in line with other high-grossing Pixar films.

Read what top critics are saying about Inside Out : 

The Hollywood Reporter ‘s Todd McCarthy  says the film “serves up some abstractions and flights of  deconstructive  fancy that will most likely go over the heads of viewers with ages in the single digits. But this adventurous outing manages the great Pixar trick of operating on two levels — captivating fun for kids, disarming smarts for adults — that sets the studio apart. Reliably big summer grosses appear in store.”

He adds, “ Poehler’s energetic voicing of Joy dominates the dialogue , and quite agreeably so. All the other voice actors blend in nicely without being too eccentric —  Bill Hader portrays Fear, Mindy Kaling is Disgust, Lewis Black is Anger and Smith is the unassertive but undeniable Sadness. Among the ‘real’ characters, Kaitlyn Dias plays Riley, Diane Lane is Mom and Kyle MacLachlan is Dad.

“In a cheeky move on the part of Bay Area-based Pixar, San Francisco is, for once, portrayed in a negative light (the family’s new home is located on a cramped, dingy downtown street). As usual with the company’s fare, there are plenty of blink-and-they’re-gone jokes, including the depiction of the part of the brain that creates dreams as a movie studio.”

The New York Times ‘ A.O. Scott writes, “The achievement of Inside Out is at once subtler and more impressive. This is a movie almost entirely populated by abstract concepts moving through theoretical space. This world is both radically new — you’ve never seen anything like it — and instantly recognizable, as familiar aspects of consciousness are given shape and voice. Remember your imaginary childhood friend? Your earliest phobias? Your strangest dreams? You will, and you will also have a newly inspired understanding of how and why you remember those things. You will look at the screen and know yourself.”

Los Angeles Times’   Kenneth Turan   calls it “even better, as in the best of Pixar, are thoughts and insights about the human experience. Though it doesn’t seem that way at first, the five emotions are not rivals jousting for power and control; they are united by wanting the best for Riley. And when Joy begins to understand the value and purpose of Sadness, that leads to moments no one is going to forget.”

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Time ‘s Mary Pols   declares it “perhaps the craziest movie Pixar has ever come up with. Imagine Fellini using animation to create a narrative starring the limbic system, with diversions to the subconscious (‘where they take all the troublemakers’), treacherous trips into abstract thinking and rides on the highly erratically scheduled train of thought.” Additionally, “Riley’s mother and father have their own five-character emotion parade. It is true that Riley’s Disgust eggs on Anger, and that Joy, a bossy hedonist, would rather Sadness stay within the chalk circle she draws for her. But the emotions are all in this together, in support of Riley. One of Inside Out ’s great triumphs is Joy’s dawning realization about the need for balance and the gifts that unmasked Sadness can bring, including the support of one’s loved ones.”

Chicago Tribune ‘s Michael Phillips argues, “Saying Inside Out is the best Disney-Pixar picture since Up in 2009 says less than it should, considering the distressing if profitable recent mediocrities Cars 2 and Monsters University .” He adds “there’s a truly lovely resolution, completely trackable even for preteens, resting on the notion of mixed emotions, and the value of acknowledging life’s hardships, rather than papering them over with false good cheer. This is why Inside Out  works. We feel for the girl at its center, and when things go right after going wrong, the swell of emotion is neither cheap nor bombastic.”

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• Review: <i>Inside Out</i> Takes a Mind-Blowing Trip Inside the Brain

Review: Inside Out Takes a Mind-Blowing Trip Inside the Brain

T he most profound—as well as profoundly good —Pixar movies are the ones that seem the least plausible as story pitches. Consider Up (crushed by encroaching development, old man flies away with his house) and WALL-E (environmental wasteland, nice robot). Now, there’s Inside Out , which defies the conventions of family movies by being an animated comedy about brain chemistry and situational depression.

That makes it perhaps the craziest movie Pixar has ever come up with. Imagine Fellini using animation to create a narrative starring the limbic system, with diversions to the subconscious (“where they take all the troublemakers”), treacherous trips into abstract thinking and rides on the highly erratically scheduled train of thought. From a story hatched by co-directors Peter Docter ( Up, Monsters, Inc. ) and Ronaldo del Carmen, Inside Out is nearly hallucinogenic, entirely beautiful and easily the animation studio’s best release since 2010’s Toy Story 3. Stylistically Inside Out is nothing like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood , but for its scope in examining the maturation process, it might well be called Childhood .

The central human character is an 11 year-old only child named Riley Anderson (voiced by Kaityn Dias) who loves hockey and her parents, but the story is mainly told from the perspective of five core human emotions. Joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust are all depicted as characters that live within Riley. (Usually scientists go with happy when they’re talking about emotions, but Joy makes a better name for anyone voiced by Amy Poehler. Talk about type-casting; you wonder if the movie was built around her Parks and Recreation persona). These five characters move in and out of control of the central keyboard of Riley’s brain until a crisis is set in motion by the Anderson family’s relocation from Minnesota to San Francisco. While the movers dawdle and Dad’s “investors” jerk his startup chain, the Andersons live in an empty, narrow, dirty house. (Even the perkiest real estate agent would stretch to call this a Victorian, but in the nation’s hottest real estate market, it probably cost at least $1.5 million.)

No wonder Riley has trouble summoning her joy, especially facing a new school. Sadness (the wonderful Phyllis Smith, from The Office ), blue-skinned and bound up in a tight turtleneck sweater, keeps touching and thus sullying all the old good memories; soon, Anger (Lewis Black) moves into the driver’s seat, with Fear (Bill Hader) hovering near by and Disgust (Mindy Kahling) snarking from the other side. Riley plunges into a depression and the movie becomes a race against time as her good memories crumble and misery closes in. In the Pixar vision of depression, Joy and Riley’s imaginary friend from her earliest years, Bing Bong (Richard Kind) are reduced to tiny pinpoints, bright lights in sea of coal-colored thoughts and memories. They have to literally climb over the misery to get out.

The brain itself has components that look like a giant gumball machine. Riley’s various islands of personality (friends, family, hockey) could be the kind of alien outpost where Han Solo has drinks. There is an abyss, naturally, but overall this is a place of little order and great mystery, which you might not expect from Pixar, given its propensity for explaining away say, the sources of scary dreams ( Monsters, Inc .). To be lost in its bowels is terrifying even for perky Joy. One of the movie’s best gags is the snoring, red-nosed hulk hidden away in the subconscious. To see the complexity of the human brain laid out in animation, right down to arching pathways of light that look a lot like synapses, is mind-blowing in the same way Fantasia is mind-blowing.

But what makes the movie so rich and enlightening, even for an adult well acquainted with their own blue periods, is the depiction of emotions not as at war with each other but rather in a constant juggling act to keep their human going. Riley’s mother and father, voiced by Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan, have their own five-character emotion parade. It is true that Riley’s Disgust eggs on Anger, and that Joy, a bossy hedonist, would rather Sadness stay within the chalk circle she draws for her. But the emotions are all in this together, in support of Riley. One of Inside Out’s great triumphs is Joy’s dawning realization about the need for balance and the gifts that unmasked Sadness can bring, including the support of one’s loved ones.

Sadness is of course, particularly well suited to movie theaters, which are great places to cry. (As Joy urges Sadness to get out of her funk, she keeps reminding her of “that funny movie where the dog died”). Which brings me to a sidenote: For four years I shared a movie beat with TIME’s legendary critic Richard Corliss, who died in April. Richard could be territorial. A Pixar movie was a bone he never wanted to give up (unless, well… Cars 2 ). For me Inside Out was tinged with sadness that he is no longer here to see it. What would he have loved best? The sly joke that Anger is the designated newspaper reader in the group? (Choice headline: “Replaced! No Friends for Riley!”) Or the way Riley’s memory service team clears out all her piano lessons except for “Chopsticks” and “Heart and Soul?” Or perhaps the wistful lyrical pas de deux when Joy dances to one of Riley’s favorite memories of skating on a frozen Minnesota lake? Yes, to all of them, the sorrow and the joy.

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Inside Out: Emotional Truths by Way of Pixar

"inside out" proves true to cognitive, developmental, and clinical psychology..

Posted June 24, 2015 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

Dr. Janina Scarlet reviewed the film Inside Out and wanted to share her thoughts with Psychology Today readers. by Janina Scarlet

Inside Out is a movie I’d been waiting for a year to see and, once again, Pixar did not disappoint. This is a movie I’m going to be assigning to many of my patients and doctoral students as a way to demonstrate important psychological principles.

Warning: some spoilers of the movie ahead.

The movie is about an 11-year-old girl, Riley, originally from Minnesota, who moves to San Francisco with her parents. The leading characters of the movie, however, aren’t Riley and her family, but Riley’s primary emotions: Happiness (Joy), Sadness, Fear , Anger , and Disgust. These emotions demonstrate what it might be like in the mind of an 11-year-old girl who struggles with having to move to a different city, away from her friends, away from her hockey league, and has a hard time pretending to be happy for her parents.

What’s really powerful about this film is how accurate it is to cognitive, developmental, and clinical psychology. The 5 emotions used in this film are in fact 5 of the 6 scientifically validated universal emotions (the 6th one being surprise). Psychologist and scientist, Paul Ekman, is most known for his work with universal emotions as he traveled around the world and found that these were present in every culture and presented in the same way through the same facial expressions around the world. Ekman’s work has been used for psychology research, as well as for the US government, and even inspired the popular television series, ‘Lie to Me’.

Other concepts displayed in this movie included the conversion of short to long-term memory . When a memory is seen as salient or relevant enough to us, or when it has been repeated enough times, the brain messengers, dopamine and glutamate, ensure the long-term encoding of that memory. Think of these messengers as computer coders or awesome IT support team – they write the code to ensure that our brain computer is up to date with the new information. Other concepts briefly covered in the movie include psychological changes of reaching/approaching puberty , psychological stressors, family psychology, inductive and deductive reasoning (thinking like Sherlock Holmes by using logic, reasoning, and observation to reach a conclusion), and many others.

Of all 5 of Riley’s emotions, Joy seems to be the leader, she keeps the others in check but reminds the viewers that all of them have an important function. She states that Disgust keeps Riley safe from being poisoned, Fear keeps her safe from a catastrophe by imagining worst case scenarios, Anger protects her from others and also allows her to be a better hockey player, while Joy ensures that Riley is happy. However, Joy fails to see the importance of Sadness and tries to shoo Sadness away from anything Riley-related, forbidding this emotion in every way possible. She even draws a circle on the floor and makes Sadness stay inside it, forbidding her to leave or to touch any of Riley’s memories, so as not to taint them with sad memories.

As if Riley’s mind trying to keep Sadness at bay wasn’t enough, Riley’s parents put an additional pressure on her, especially when her mother asks her to “keep smiling” for her dad. Essentially, Riley’s mom, without meaning to do so, communicates to Riley that being sad about the move was not ok and that she needs to pretend to be happy to support her father through this.

Unfortunately, Joy’s good intentions backfire when Riley is unable to receive the support she so desperately needs to help her with adjusting to her new environment. In fact, Riley initially seems to be having symptoms of an Adjustment Disorder with Depressed Mood, where she has a hard time coping with her move, she withdraws from her parents and old friends, she misses school, and even tries to run away. By being unable to experience her sadness about all these changes and pretending that she was ok, Riley ends up being angry, anxious, and irritable, getting into a fight with her parents and her best friend, before shutting down altogether. In fact, it looks like Riley’s potential Adjustment Disorder might have turned into a full-blown Major Depressive Episode. (I’m saying, “might have” because in order to be diagnosed, the symptoms need to have lasted for 2 weeks or more, and we don’t know how long Riley’s symptoms actually lasted).

What messages does this movie send to its viewers?

Many, actually, but perhaps the most important one is this – our emotions are all important, every single one of them. They all serve an important function and we cannot selectively feel some but not others. It’s an “all-or-none” deal. If we numb sadness, we also numb joy. We need to openly experience all our emotions, and that includes sadness, as painful as it may be sometimes. Sadness allows for connection, when we see someone else feeling sad, we might feel sad too (this emotion is called empathy) and might want to alleviate their sadness (this is compassion). When we stay with this individual and share our emotions together, the resonating effect can produce a healing experience. That is exactly what we see when Sadness comforts Riley’s imaginary friend, Bing Bong, and also when Riley is able to share her sadness with her parents.

In fact, when we are sad, our body and facial expression cue the people around us that we need help – the tears running down our face, the pupil dilation, the non-threatening posture, all of this signals others that we could use some support. And at the same time, the people around us might then experience a bitter-sweet sensation of compassion, caused by an activation of the compassion centers of our brain (the insula and the anterior cingulate cortex, among other structures), and the warmth of the heart caused by a release of a special “cuddle” hormone , oxytocin (so called because it is released when we want to or are in the process of hugging someone, or similar actions).

The movie doesn’t stop there; it ends with a bang by reminding us that we can experience multiple (and even contradictory) emotions at the same time, such as happiness and sadness. The movie also shows that everyone experiences these emotions, as they are, in fact, universal. This demonstrates a psychological concept of common humanity, or the idea that other people are just like us, they might struggle with the same emotions, insecurities, heartbreaks, and neuroses as we do, further validating our internal experiences.

Overall, ‘Inside Out’ was amazing. I highly recommend it and would love to hear your opinions on it.

Dr. Janina Scarlet is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist, a scientist, and a full time geek. She uses Superhero Therapy to help patients with anxiety , depression , chronic pain , and PTSD at the Center for Stress and Anxiety Management and Sharp Memorial Hospital. Dr. Scarlet also teaches at Alliant International University, San Diego. Her book, Superhero Therapy, is expected to be released in July 2016 with Little, Brown Book Group.

Original post at Superhero Therapy: Psychology of "Inside Out." Shared at the author's request, with permission.

Travis Langley, Ph.D. , a professor at Henderson State University, is the author of Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight.

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Inside Out — The Movie “Inside Out”: Psychology Principles

The Movie "Inside Out": Psychology Principles

• Categories: Animation Film Analysis Inside Out

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Published: Aug 6, 2021

Words: 1033 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Works Cited

• Allen, N. B., & Badcock, P. B. (2003). The social risk hypothesis of depressed mood: Evolutionary, psychosocial, and neurobiological perspectives. Psychological Bulletin, 129(6), 887-913.
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• Gross, J. J. (2002). Emotion regulation: Affective, cognitive, and social consequences. Psychophysiology, 39(3), 281-291.
• Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1-26.
• Lerner, J. S., & Keltner, D. (2000). Beyond valence: Toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgment and choice. Cognition and Emotion, 14(4), 473-493.
• Lewis, M. D., Granic, I., & Lamm, C. (Eds.). (2006). Emotion, development, and self-organization: Dynamic systems approaches to emotional development. Cambridge University Press.
• Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2012). Emotion regulation and psychopathology: The role of gender. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 8, 161-187.
• Ochsner, K. N., & Gross, J. J. (2005). The cognitive control of emotion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(5), 242-249.
• Panksepp, J. (2007). Neurologizing the psychology of affects: How appraisal-based constructivism and basic emotion theory can coexist. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(3), 281-296.
• Smith, C. A., & Kirby, L. D. (2009). Emotion regulation in schizophrenia: Affective, social, and clinical consequences of explicit and implicit regulation. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 40(2), 338-349.

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Sociological Concepts in the “Inside Out” Film Essay

Film summary.

Riley, the central character of the film, is the cheerful and inquisitive 11-year-old schoolgirl. She lives with her parents in a small provincial town, where everyone knows each other. For several years, Riley has been communicating with the same friends and going to the same school. She does not suspect that all her relationships, thoughts, and feelings are controlled by five basic emotions: Joy, Fear, Anger, Sadness, and Disgust (“Inside Out – Official US Trailer” 00:01:01-00:01:25). These emotions live in the girl’s mind, and help her cope with problems, guiding her actions every day. Riley and her parents move to the crowded San Francisco from the small town in Minnesota. Suddenly, Sadness and Joy turn out to be in the storage of memory, and the girl falls into depression.

They are looking for a way out of the labyrinths of the long-term memory archives. There, these two emotions meet Bing Bong, the pink elephant, and Riley’s imaginary friend. Understanding the urgency of the situation, he tries to help and lead them on the way to Headquarters. However, the path is not easy and straight: buildings turn into abstract forms, and several stations are passed. The situation is complicated because the long-term memory is demolished to some extent so that Joy cannot rejoice, Riley, while Sadness helps with her grief. Only after Joy and Sadness understand the significance of the collaborative actions, do they cope with difficulties and find the way back to Headquarters. This prevents Riley from the escape and makes her talk with parents about the fact that she misses her old life.

Concept Application

The conflict of this film occurs based on the necessity of the social integration that implies the adoption of an individual by other members of the group. In Riley’s case, she was threatened by the idea of losing the achieved status in a new city. The situation is complicated because she has strong gemeinschaft that is expressed in close relationships with the family and the community (Vaughan and Hogg 400). When Riley feels that parents cannot understand her concerns, her behavior tends to backstage . This means that the girl starts to act as no audience is present so that nobody sees her. At this point, each of the emotions believes that she or he knows best what to do in a difficult situation, and the girl has complete confusion. To build a life in a big city, get used to a new school, and make friends with classmates, Riley’s emotions have to learn how to work together and use groupthink .

When Joy and Sadness, along with an armful of Key Memories, accidentally fly into the pipe, Riley falls into depression. Her core values , based on her character, begin to fall apart after the first serious conflict. In Riley’s life, the main place is occupied by Joy, and when she is temporarily unable to make decisions, the girl’s personality becomes at risk of the collapse. The concept of looking-glass self may be applied here (Vaughan and Hogg, 106). Riley believes that Joy identifies her personality as people like when she is happy, and she becomes joyful as people around her view her in this manner. However, the short-term absence of Joy shows that other emotions are also quite important. For example, emotions understand that the successful game of hockey may benefit from Anger that acts as an excellent stimulant, and there is no need for Joy.

In response to loss and parting, the main heroine reacts with anger and rejection. It would be good to connect this situation to Sadness and cry, but the latter disappears as well as Joy. The world fades and turns into one great evil, in which there is no chance to create new contacts. The so-called destruction mechanism erases all the good from memory, including the ability to love and enjoy. While in the arsenal of a person, there is only Joy, his or her strength is not enough to cope with difficulties as the ability to withstand depressive feelings, loss, and parting is formed with the help of Sadness. The awareness of grief helps to understand and handle difficult situations and problems. Sadness makes a person stronger and wiser, expanding the possibilities of new relationships and recovering the existing ones. Thus, pluralism turns out to be effective and leading as it focuses on multiple emotions.

It is possible to note that the film focuses on a non-material culture that consists of mores , norms , and values . The mentioned elements interact with each other to initiate social change or establish stability in terms of the exchange theory (Vaughan and Hogg 502). Moreover, the fact that Riley puts sanctions that refer to restrictions, criticism, and ridicule regarding social norms proves that the attempt to lock emotions and squeeze out a smile leads to the breakdown. Riley loses her ability to be sad and happy, depending on the situation and instead of acquiring fear, irritation, and disgust for everything.

Five characters-emotions observe the islands that compose the personality structure of Riley: Friendship, Family, Honesty, Hockey that can be interpreted as self-confidence, because the girl is rather interested in this game and wins prizes, and Mischief. Riley’s balance is threatened: if the islands shine with lights at the beginning of the film, they are gradually covered with cracks and are about to collapse at all. While Riley prepares to do the thoughtless things that school girls do in desperation, as the stereotype states, her two main emotions are struggling to return to her from the most terrible place in the world – the Subconscious. Returning to Headquarters, Joy and Sadness restore the personality structure through the deep memories, resulting in Riley, who tried to escape, comes back, has an open dialogue with her nuclear family , and makes her life balanced and happy.

This history of emotions is not just a colorful setting of the visually original world, but also the mechanism of perception of the world, the formation of memories, and the changes in their emotional state. According to the containment theory , the behavior is shaped by what an individual wants rather than by the outside factors. The weaker the containment, the higher the risk of deviance , violating social norms. Riley’s first reaction to the difficult situation was to escape from problems that created depression primarily caused by her behavior and perception. The film shows how people forget the events from childhood, how they confuse the facts and the situation in which all their feelings turn off plunged into shock and apathy. All this is surprisingly simple and understandable in the movie.

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Inside Out – Analysis: The Epitome of Expression

Inside Out is a fun movie that satirizes what happens inside our brains, with a meaning so deep, one could argue that it is destined for kids and adults alike, in order for them to find the path to embrace the true nature of their emotions.

Pixar always appeals both kids and adults for its ability to deal with deep and important themes. Watch our Toy Story analysis here.

Joy can sometimes feel like the antagonist of the movie, usurping Sadness attempts to work and let Riley experience other emotions. Joy’s intentions are such, so Riley always stays happy. What she needs to learn, is that emotions are more complex than what she gives them credit, and that being joyous all the time is not the answer to all the situations life puts us on.

It is obviously good to always try and see the bright side of things and stay optimistic, but sometimes, the situation demands a different kind of reaction, one that allows us to stay emotionally healthy. One must allow oneself to feel and let emotions burst from the inside out when needed.

Emotions are meant to be expressed, not suppressed:

• If it’s joy, live the moment and make it last
• If it’s anger, play a sport or find a way to let out the steam
• If it’s sadness, cry it out and release the pain

One theme throughout the movie is change, and how growing up is all about change in behavior, complexity, taste, personality, etc. This change is represented as the growth into maturity, which also is best illustrated with the changes in the control panel that resides in each one of the brains or consciousness, as an Inside Out metaphor about how complex neuroscience actually is and how we visualize, understand and react towards other’s emotions via our empathic capabilities.

Throughout all the movie we are led to believe that the emotions running things around become missing or make decisions basing themselves in what each believes it’s right when in reality Riley’s own decision making and awareness is the trigger. And yes, the emotions are Riley’s drivers, but that’s to provide characterization and to drive the plot. To further explain let’s take a deeper look at some key moments in the movie:

Joy and Sadness weren’t missing because of their feud becoming an accident, but for the same reasons, Riley explains to her parents about her behavior. She thought her parents expected a specific behavior from her so she herself suppressed her emotions as a coping mechanism. She doesn’t come back from the bus station because Sadness and Joy arrived in the nick of time to the control panel, but from her own realization that she is behaving immaturely and finally lets her emotions run out.

We experience Riley’s growth through Joy and as Riley matures, her emotions do it as well. The key to matureness is to know how, why and when to express our feelings; how can they adapt and combine with one another for more complex feelings while shaping our personality. This is what Joy finally understood by being stuck with Bing Bong. She learns by example, that sometimes other emotions like are the answer to life’s ever-recurring problems and how the different and most meaningful moments of our lives are a combination of feelings.

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Inside Out: Film Analysis

• Category Entertainment
• Subcategory Movies
• Topic Film Analysis , Inside Out

It is okay to be sad on the surface that’s one of the easier messages to take away from this movie inside out where emotions frame the way our brains store and influence our daily interactions with the outside world by helping to create our personalities, and the message by the end of the film is that it is okay to be sad. We don’t start there though inside out immediately an assumption about how we perceive emotions sadness is bad. We all want to be happy everything sadness touches it permanently changes. The emotional intelligence of inside out revolves around Riley’s core emotions. There are five emotions discussed in the movie which includes joy a yellow girl who remains positive every time.

She is the prominent emotion in control of Riley and is the glue that keeps all the other emotions together. So in this way joy is guiding us to remain positive and be happy in our bad days also. There is a relationship between us and our emotions emotional intelligence in this movie helping us a lot to be a good person. Another emotion of riley is fear.

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Fear appears on the list of basic emotions and is categorized as negative, and the lesson fear giving us in this movie is that always try to beat your biggest fear. Don’t let fear or insecurity stop you from trying new things. Believe in yourself. Do what you love. And most importantly, be kind to others, even if you don’t like them.

There are moments when a person feels disgust without cognition, but some things are learned to be disgust as riley with broccoli. Disgust is the negative emotion which means rejection this is a natural thing but movie is helping us to control our emotion of disgust. In the movie her job is to keep Riley from being poisoned both physically and socially, which is not good in front of public.

Once a writer said ‘A life without sadness would have less color to it.’In the movie she is not helping riley to move on. Anger is most often categorized as a negative emotion because of its connection with aggression. From an emotional development point of view, anger is a motivator for defense. From a psychological perspective, anger is seen as an instigator of correcting a wrong which are all characteristics of Riley’s Anger who is shaped like a red brick and combusts when agitated.

Inside Out enables children to explore their emotions and feelings not only through the five core emotions, but also through the emotional narrative of Riley.

There are two distinctive moments for Riley’s emotional literacy: one is at the beginning of the film and the other towards the end.

I conclude, that films are an example of these tools that allow children to interpret and understand themselves and the world they live in. Emotional literacy is learnt through interaction, whether it is with a person or a text – an animated film in this case. Riley learns to navigate her emotions within the world, reassuring the audience that feelings of anger, fear and disgust are not wrong, but essential elements in coming to terms with big feelings of joy and sadness. Inside Out teaches audiences emotional literacy, the ability to understand and express your own emotions and understand and empathize with others. This contributes to the emotional intelligence of the viewer to recognize and distinguish emotions within themselves and others and to create narratives individual to themselves.

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Home / Essay Samples / Entertainment / Inside Out / Thematic Analysis Of The Film Called “Inside Out”

Thematic Analysis Of The Film Called "Inside Out"

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• Topic: Film Analysis , Inside Out

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