What is Inside Out about?
Inside Out serves as a template that helps kids (and adults) have a better concept of their emotions. It takes something abstract and defines it in a way that’s understandable and relatable. The main lesson is about the role emotions play and coming to appreciate how even something like sadness has a part in our well-being and overall mental health. It also reminds viewers that part of growing up is letting go, and while that’s sad it’s also necessary and okay.
Cast
- Joy – Amy Poehler
- Sadness – Phyllis Smith
- Fear – Bill Hader
- Disgust – Mindy Kaling
- Anger – Lewis Black
- Bing Bong – Richard Kind
- Riley – Kaitlyn Dias
- Mom – Diane Lane
- Dad – Kyle MacLachland
- Written by – Pete Docter | Meg LeFauve | Josh Cooley
- Directed by – Pete Docter
The relationship between Joy and Sadness
Pixar constructs films in a very lean, deliberate way. This is, of course, evident in the work itself. But if you read Creativity, Inc., a history of the studio by its co-founder, Ed Catmull, then you learn a lot about not only the company’s history but how collaborative and thorough they are when it comes to story development.
The writer of Toy Story 3, Michael Arndt, did an interview with Red Letter Studio, and he said, about the Pixar process, “The metaphor I could use is that writing one of these scripts or making one of these films is like building a Cathedral. It really is the expression of a whole creative community. Until you get there, you can’t imagine how much work goes in, and not even just making the movie, just putting the story together is such a laborious process. And it’s really because you make the film like seven or eight times…. But there were some scenes where I wrote sixty drafts, just because you are always honing and honing and polishing so that it just works.”
With that in mind, what do we see at the very beginning of Inside Out? Riley’s born. Joy comes into existence. And she’s all alone with Riley for 33 seconds. Until Sadness appears. Even though Fear, Disgust, and Anger show up soon after and are prevalent throughout, that opening scene signals to the viewer that the main narrative dynamic will be this relationship between Joy and Sadness.
Most movies use the first 20 minutes to introduce us to the characters and establish necessary exposition, tensions, and thematic foundations. Then, around the 20-minute mark, it happens. Pixar calls it The Event. Traditional storytelling refers to it as the Inciting Incident. I preferThe Escalation. Whatever you want to call it, that’s when the movie shifts into the next gear.
In the movie Inception, at 19 minutes and 57 seconds, Cobb asks Saito “What do you want from us.” And at 19 minutes and 59 seconds, Saito says, “Inception.” At 20:02 he asks “Is it possible?”
In Hereditary, the 20-minute mark finds Annie attending a group therapy session. There, she explains her family’s history of mental illness. It’s a scene that’s easily overlooked, if not outright forgotten, since the rest of the movie goes off the rails as a cult and demon work together to take possession of Annie’s son’s body. But the therapy session is positioned at this crucial moment because it gives the viewer the realistic frame through which to consider the fantastic events that follow. It’s the director telling the audience “This story is a metaphor for the mental health woes that Annie mentions here, and how destructive such things can be.”
In Inside Out, the 25-minute mark is when Joy and Sadness get sucked out of headquarters and sent into the wilds of Riley’s mind. It’s not all the emotions. Just Joy and Sadness. That reinforces the idea that it’s the relationship between these two, specifically, that the movie is most concerned with. It’s also worth nothing that Anger is all red. Disgust is all green. Fear is all purple. Sadness is all blue. Joy is yellow. Except she also has blue hair. She is the only emotion that has hair that differs like that. Why? Because it emphasizes her relationship with Sadness.
And what do we see at the end of Inside Out? The major lesson Joy learns is about how necessary Sadness is. She had spent the movie only thinking of Sadness as a negative. Every opportunity Joy had, she tried to limit Sadness’s interactions with Riley. Until she finally realizes that sadness serves as a kind of Bat Signal to Riley’s loved ones that Riley needs care, comfort, and support.
Memories, for most of the film, had matched the color of whatever emotion defined that memory. But Joy has this memory that starts blue, with Riley sad in a tree, but turns yellow, to joy, as her parents and hockey teammates comfort her.
As much as you can discuss other aspects of Inside Out, the film is primarily concerned with this relationship dynamic between Joy and Sadness. Ostensibly, it’s a message to kids, as this is a movie for kids, that their emotions will become more complex. It’s not only anger or joy or disgust or fear or sadness. Emotions will, as you get older, mix. A haunted house is fear and joy. Failing a test is anger, disgust, fear, and sadness. Daring a friend to blend together a bunch of different foods then drink the concoction is disgust and joy.
Coming to terms with time, letting go of the past
The big lesson about Joy and Sadness is framed by Riley’s relationship to time. When you look back over Inside Out, you realize time is actually a major factor. We start with Riley as a newborn baby then jump to her at 11 years old. So the film’s already grounding us in the idea of age, which is a factor of time.
Then you have the family’s move from Minnesota to San Francisco. Suddenly the life Riley had known becomes a relic of the past. Something she can never get back. The page has turned. And we watch as Sadness keeps trying to touch memory after memory, especially the core memories, to turn them blue. But Joy is relentless in trying to prevent this contact, to preserve the happiness and innocence of those memories.
So the yellow memory orbs become this physical representation of Riley’s relationship with her past. And that dynamic repeats in the relationship Joy has with Bing Bong. Bing Bong is Riley’s imaginary friend, now forgotten. A quick Google search reveals that kids have imaginary friends between three and five years old. With Riley being 11, it makes sense why Bing Bong is collecting dust. He was part of a specific period of her life. But that period is over. Most kids who watch Inside Out will understand that. Same with the adults.
The imaginary friend seemed like it would be a best friend forever. It’s the same with Riley and Minnesota. It seemed like it would be where Riley spent all of her life. But life isn’t that simple. We move on. Inside Out tells kids, and reminds adults, that it’s okay. Moving on is part of growing up.
Abstract thought
I thought this was a nice meta-moment. When Joy, Sadness, and Bing Bong enter the room of abstract thought, they experience the four stages of abstraction.
- Non-objective fragmentation
- Deconstructing
- Two-dimensional (lacking depth)
- Non-figurative
So non-objective fragmentation means the pieces of the whole. Which is why we see the characters turn Picasso-y. They’ve gone from a complete object to individual pieces of an object. It’s like getting furniture delivered from IKEA and it’s all the pieces not yet assembled. They’re fragments of the final object.
Think about an abstract concept like love. We have that idea in mind. But what is love? To understand it, we first break it into fragments. It’s family. A romantic partner. Your favorite food. Your dog. Etc.
Next is deconstruction. Which Inside Out shows as the individual parts of the characters literally breaking away from the whole. That’s essentially just saying that at this stage the “fragment” is no longer looked at as relating to the whole. It’s a thing unto itself. So instead of “your dog” being an example of a thing you love, it’s just what it is—your dog.
Which leads to two dimensions. It’s not your dog. It’s just a dog. An animal. A thing.
And then, lastly, non-figurative. “Non-figurative” literally means abstract. Which is why we see the characters devolve completely. Joy’s a spike-y shape that’s vaguely like a sun or star. Bing Bong’s a tapered blob that’s supposed to be an elephant trunk. And Sadness is a lump.
You see how an abstract starts vague, gains shape, develops dimensionality and nuanced parts, then becomes a whole where everything comes together.
The meta-moment in all of this is that Inside Out is the story of turning abstract emotions and the enigmatic processes of the mind into identifiable characters and relatable operations. For example, a memory. Memory is the combination of visuals, audio, emotions, and other details stored in different neurons throughout the brain. How do you turn something so internal and abstract into a single object people can understand and relate to? Pixar went with a glass ball that plays a movie and is color coded to an emotion.
The same thing happened with turning emotions into characters. Joy is abstract. What’s it look like as a non-figurative figure? Well, we associate the emotion with happiness and positivity. With brightness. Brightness makes you think of the sun. So yellow. And then you’re off. Same thing with sadness. When someone is sad, we say they’re blue. So an abstract of sadness would be a blue lump.
So creating Inside Out was an act of de-abstracting. Taking what’s within and reimagining it for others to see. The act of turning inside out.
