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Feeling Down on “Inside Out”

The new Pixar film is poignant—and didactic.
Inside out

Pixar’s “Inside Out” is a charming, vividly-imagined film with terrific comic timing. Its insights are sharp and its message accurate. So why was I the only person in the theater who didn’t sniffle?

“Inside Out” takes us into the brain of Riley, a buoyantly happy 11-year-old girl about to face her first major life challenge: a move from Minnesota to San Francisco. We see the world inside her head, including a control room operated by her emotions. Joy (Amy Poehler) is in charge, a strenuously cheerful “Go, team!” type whose outline fizzes with energy. There’s also Fear, who “keeps Riley safe”; Disgust, who apparently helps her to figure out what’s cool as well as keeping her from eating broccoli; Anger; and mopey blue Sadness (Phyllis Smith). The challenge for Riley is coping with a new house, new school, new classmates, trying out for a new hockey team. The challenge for Joy turns out to be not only protecting Riley but figuring out what on earth Sadness is there for. What good is she?

The movie lays it out for you plainly, and it is true: Sadness allows you to empathize. Sadness brings people together by giving other people the chance to comfort and care for you, and giving you the sorrow that allows you to understand others’ hurts. At times this movie even echoes Allie Brosh’s “My fish is dead” comic about depression, which depicts the way being cheered up can make you feel much worse, and the way that emotional numbness is much worse than sadness or anger.

“Inside Out” is acute (and very, very blunt) in its portrayal of happiness as something parents expect from their kids: American kids almost have a duty to be happy. This movie gives voice to the fear and unhappiness these expectations can bring kids. It has some terrific lines (introducing Anger: “He cares very deeply about things being fair”). It’s replete with poignant images, like the golden happy memory globes turning blue as Sadness touches them.

The thing is, this is a movie that exists to teach kids how to feel their feelings. I couldn’t help being reminded of the picture books my parents would give me to help me with my own “defects of character”: Leo the Lion Takes a Bath, and all that. (“You got soap in my eyes! I HATE it when you get soap in my eyes!!”—actual dialogue, I think.) The use of characters named Sadness and Joy just took this movie too far into the realm of moral lesson, for me. There’s a workbook feeling to this movie, a whiff of the school counselor’s office.

That slightly utilitarian feel was intensified for me by the specific imagery “Inside Out” uses to depict the mind. Joy and her colleagues are in the control room, pressing buttons and reading manuals—even joy is work. Every culture has its own vocabulary for representing experience. I wonder how different “Inside Out” would feel if Riley’s mind were a palace, or an obstreperous parliament; or a cathedral. Instead the imagery we get is control panels, construction crews, security guards, and shift work.

There are various other weird glitches. Our rare glimpses into other people’s minds are much flatter than what we see in Riley’s—univocal—and they’re not merely gendered but gender-stereotyped. Both the unanimity of the emotions and the stereotyping are done for comedic effect, which is mostly successful, but it throws off the message and the metaphors. Many of Riley’s happiest memories cluster around honesty; I do not believe that has ever been true of any 11-year-old human or other mammal.

In general I found it hard to believe that a child had reached that age with so few awful memories, persistent shames, or sins. We visit her subconscious and the great lurking fears there are broccoli and the vacuum cleaner. She’s eleven. I led a charmed life as a child, and I had accumulated more Dostoyevskyan angst by age six than this kid seems to harbor at twice that. (The unrelentingly sunny, goofy, princess-pink aura of her fantasy realms seems especially unrealistic. John Darnielle maybe has a closer eye on what happens inside the World of Pure Imagination.) I don’t know, maybe I’m just jealous; maybe some kids really are that cloudless?

But the friend with whom I saw this movie was floored by it. For him, the movie brilliantly depicted what it feels like to put up a facade, to know that people expect a certain level of competent happiness from you even when it feels like Sadness or Anger has hijacked your control panel.

“Inside Out” moves from happy memories to an emphasis on bittersweet ones. It strongly hints that all memories eventually become bittersweet. There’s even a moment toward the end where Joy, not Sadness, turns a memory blue: That’s a haunting, beautifully simple way of conveying a complex psychological truth.

I think this movie will be good for children and many adults will be deeply moved by it. The fact that it didn’t quite get there for me shouldn’t stop you from loading this into your memory tubes.

Eve Tushnet is a TAC contributing editor, blogs at Patheos.com, and is the author of the recently-released book Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith.


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