Inside Out hits you hard if you’re willing to listen. As someone who is full of feelings, I’m always down to talk about them. I think it is important ask, in times of sadness or in happiness, What are you feeling? Well, it’s a loaded question.
Inside Out, film director Pete Docter’s (Toy Story, WALL-E, Up) latest project, was released in the early summer of this year. The film, a Disney-Pixar partnership production that features colourful characters, comical-but-age-appropriate shenanigans, and strong messages about friendship and family, is geared towards a younger audience. However, the film sheds many perceived genre confinements in its overall message to the audience, which is applicable to child and adult alike.
The film intersects the story of 11–year-old Riley and her move from her snowy Minnesota home to a cloudy San Francisco side street with the story of her capital “E” Emotions—Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust—during this experience. We watch how Riley’s memories and emotions bleed into each other; together, they make Riley who she is and explain why she acts or thinks the way she does. Together, this motley crew works in a control center in Riley’s mind, facilitating her actions, thoughts, beliefs, and memories.
As the turmoil builds in Riley’s mind and she faces homesickness for her beloved Minnesota, Joy and Sadness get lost in Riley’s long-term memory storage, a maze of thousands of memories she has made. Fear, Disgust, and Anger are left alone with Riley and inadvertently place her in dangerous circumstances until Joy and Sadness learn to work together and return. Finally, Riley allows herself to fully experience the pain she feels having left all that she knew and loved behind.
We feel sad, elated, or nervous about things all the time, but as we become adults, we are taught to neutralize everything. Free expression and a general openness to people begin to suffer in the face of difficult life experiences. We learn to adapt to the casualties of living. This is good in some ways—we become stronger people, more resilient individuals. These are skills we ultimately need to survive and succeed in life.
After leaving the theatre, I took the TTC home. I found myself actually looking at the people around me on the subway. I started to wonder what emotions were conversing in their minds and which one was running the control center. When you live in a city as big as Toronto and are smashed between people going in different directions with different agendas, jobs, and lives, the human condition seems forgotten. It becomes a challenge to recall in the way we view the world.
Yes, everyone on the subway was composed, minding their own business, and I really could not tell who was having a bad day or who was on top of the world. And that didn’t really matter. The fact that I had stopped and was reminded of the universality of emotions was truly an enlightenment that Inside Out had given me in that moment.
When we morph into adults, we are suddenly expected to deal with troubles quietly. But that doesn’t solve problems, and it can create something as minute as a bad attitude, or something as serious as addiction or depression. The film demonstrates, in a masterfully creative way, that everyone feels, everyone gets hurt, and that it is quite alright to admit it and maybe once in a while express it.
Emotions are who we are, and they are vital to self-understanding. That’s the beauty and risk of really living: you will experience all kinds of highs and lows, just like Riley. We know that, but sometimes you need a visual reminder to nudge you and say, “Hey, it’s going to fit together, just you wait.”
Comments are closed.