Inside Out

As long as the topic is being discussed, it might be interesting to note that a highly disproportionate number of their movies largely sidestep the matter of race all together by having their main characters - if not their entire casts - not be human at all.

The Cars movies and Bugs Life have no humans onscreen at all, Monsters Inc & University has a grand total of 1 human character who shows up for more than a few short minutes, Finding Nemo (And presumably Finding Dory) has humans less as characters and more as ignorant antagonistic forces of nature, in the Toy Story movies they're mostly plot devices aside from TS 2's Al and show up relatively infrequently, and in Wall-E humans don't show up until the second act of the movie and even then they're by and large relegated to a supporting role behind Wall-E and EVA's love story.

edited 31st May '15 3:23:37 PM by TheSpaceJawa

And Toy Story 1 really only showed the four children, didn't it? Other humans would be like the Faceless Mom of Mystery.

The only humans really shown in TS 1 were Andy and his little sister. Any others went the way of being faceless minor roles.

And Sid as the horrifying torture monster of evil.

Some how I forgot about him. Don't know how.

Yeah, Sid and Hannah, that's how I came up with four. Not sure how much was shown of the birthday guests...

So after several weeks of delay, here is Part 1 of my spoiler filled review of Inside Out.

   Spoiler Filled Review of Inside Out   

Before we begin, full disclosure, I ended up having to re-read the book. So much of the plot is focused on world building and character development, so much through nonverbal description, and it was pretty challenging to adapt.

The story begins with the birth of Riley and the creation of Joy. Joy is the first emotion that Riley experienced and since her birth has decided to take control as her primary emotion. We then learn that her emotions not just guide Riley through life but actually are the primary operators of her (e.g. making frequent use of the phrase "I'm driving"). Soon after Joy's creation, Sadness is experienced causing Riley to cry. Joy, out of service to Riley, dominates over her by telling her to get off the controls and Sadness complies. Later we are introduced to Fear, Disgust, and Anger. In addition, we learn that in the creation of new memories (they look like orbs), Core Memories are what drive Riley's Islands of Personality and are created whenever an important life event occurs. These are Color-Coded for Your Convenience.

Flash forward eleven years to the future and Riley is a preteen. Her mind is now connected to five personality islands: Hockey, Goofball, Family, Honesty and Friendship (described as mini themeparks) and 80% of her other memories are gold, with some purple, green and red ones. None are blue. During this time, Riley's parents decide to move from their cozy home in Minnesota to an antique Victorian San Francisco home because of her Dad's job. A fine choice (if I say so myself), except Riley isn't happy one bit- refusing to look past leaving her friends, school and hockey team in favor of living in a freaking victorian house in San Francisco. The rest of the emotions are malcontent about this upending as well, (Anger is furious at the new gourmet style San Francisco broccoli pizza ["First the Hawaiians now YOU!"] and Disgust mentions how she is now "envying" a dead mouse they found in their new dilapidated home). Joy tries to keep order by reminding Riley of some of her more cheerful memories, until Sadness ends up accidentally turning one of them blue. Joy manages to change it back. It is here we find out that if Sadness turns a Core Memory blue, they are unable to turn back. Joy, exasperated, commands Sadness to go read some Mind Manuals to preoccupy herself.

That night, the other emotions are still upset with Joy trying to maintain a positive outlook to what they deem as a fruitless situation. Anger is just about to make Riley flip the %#$@ out until Mom comes in and tells Riley that Dad has been going through a lot of stress at work, but because of Riley's positive attitude it's getting the family by and thanks her. Anger calms down and helpfully relinquishes the controls back to Joy. As Riley prepares to go to sleep, Joy is on Dream Duty which basically means tuning into the Made-For-TV Movie that Dream Productions is showing while processing Riley's daily memories to long term. The film they are showing happens to be a horror film (nightmare) and Joy decides to usurp control by plugging the connection into a happier memory. This is a theme that will come back throughout the course of the story- i.e. Joy deciding to take reins and control Riley whenever she deems necessary

The next day is the first day of school and all of the Emotions are helping Riley prepare (this clip from Cannes). Joy gives everyone jobs except for Sadness who she cheerfully tells her to sit inside a circle and basically not poison Riley for the day. While Riley arrives in class, Fear prepares a list of worst possible outcomes for the day (he's narrowed it down to quicksand, spontaneous human combustion and getting called on by the teacher). The teacher decides to call on Riley to introduce herself (Fear: "Seriously, right out of the gate?! This cannot be happening! Quick, pretend we don't speak English!") and Joy decides to take over as she tells the class about her life in Minnesota. However, as Riley is reliving her happier life, she starts to cry and Joy notices that Sadness had accidentally caused one of the memories to turn blue. As Joy attempts to change it back, Sadness decides to take control, causing Riley to cry in front of the class. This, inadvertently creates a blue Core Memory which rolls down the rails to join the other memories. Joy freaks out and proceeds to rip it out of the console and vacuum eject it into "Memory Dump" to be forgotten forever, but in her commotion she accidentally causes the five Core Memory globes to get unplugged. While she attempts to gather them up, she and Sadness both get ejected from Headquarters, with the rest of the emotions watching. Anger politely asks if he can "use that curse word now".

As Sadness and Joy + Core Memories both land in Long Term Memory (a memory archive of sorts), Sadness mentions that without Joy Riley is unable to experience happiness. Additionally due to the absence of the core memories, all of the Islands of Personality are down, so Joy and Sadness proceed to make the long trek back to headquarters. Meanwhile outside w/ Riley, Mom mentions that she was able to find a local hockey team that she might be able to try out for. The other emotions are ecstatic but without Joy they are unable to fully express their content. There's a funny scene where Disgust attempts to be joy but instead of saying "That sounds fantastic!" it comes out as half hearted and sarcastic. This engagement causes the scene we've seen in the trailers of the Mom Emotions vs Dad Emotions vs Riley Emotions ending with a DEFCON 4 and "The Foot Is Down". After being sent to her room, Dad comes in apologizing and trying to cheer up his now emotionally stunted daughter. Acting like a monkey, we see Goofball Island still inactive from being separated by its power source and Dad gives up and leaves, not realizing why his daughter doesn't want to play with him. Without Joy, Goofball Island is permanently deactivated and after that scene we see it permanently fall and collapse into the Memory Dump.

Cut to Joy and Sadness now looking over into the abyss at the gaping hole that was once Goofball Island. As Sadness begins to react appropriately, Joy weakly attempt to cheer up Sadness. And by weak attempt I mean Joy's perspective, considering her solution is to tell Sadness to not obsess over life's problems and instead to "Remember the funny movie where the dog dies at the end" (Literally what she said). However Joy's..... dead dog doesn't seem to be helping, so the two try to navigate out of Long Term Memory thanks to all those memorized Mind Manuals Sadness has been reading. As they traverse through LTM, Joy and Sadness come across a couple of mind workers called the "Forgetters". They are a clumsy bunch of oafs who mention that their job is to clear out faded memories by sending them through a vacuum tube to Memory Dump, while sending more important ones back to headquarters. There seems to be only one they can't seem to throw away- a mind inducingly catchy gum commercial song. It's clear this scene will serve no other purpose later .

Meanwhile, Riley is on the phone with one of her closest friends from Minnesota. While talking she learns that her friend has become friends with one of the new hockey players and unable to reconcile that her friend has a life outside of her, Riley becomes distraught as Anger takes controls. This eruption of friendship causes Friendship Island to explode just as Joy and Sadness are attempting to reach it to cross over back to Headquarters (You notice a pattern going on here?). They decide to head to Hockey Island to get home.

While traveling, they run into a pink elephant-thing creature who instantly recognizes Joy. This creature is Bing Bong, a past imaginary friend of Riley's preschool era who is part cat, part elephant and part dolphin. He appears to have been forgotten by Riley at some point and is currently in denial of this, which has caused his brain to go a little funny. Joy promises that once they get back to Headquarters she'll help him get remembered and Bing Bong enthusiastically tells them of a short cut back to headquarters, by taking the Train of Thought. However to get to the Train of Thought (and yes, I realize that I am now sounding like a Legend of Zelda game walkthrough) they trio must pass through ABSTRACT CONCEPTS.

Ahem. I will take a break now as I try to best try to describe the events of this one. Out of all the things Inside Out has presented, this is by far the weirdest.

edited 31st May '15 5:08:27 PM by Mattonymy

At most, probably up to their torsos for a few seconds. I think some people from Pizza planet had the same deal.

edited 31st May '15 4:03:29 PM by ScottPilgrim2013

Maybe make part 2 a separate post?

Also the colors are unaffected by spoiler tags! Be careful.

Yep, colors are unaffected. My original intention was to have everything Color-Coded for Your Convenience, but I decided to just have the first instance of names listed. Everything else is just black and white.

And also yes. There's a part 2 and possibly a part 3 coming soon!

Question: Do Riley's Islands of Personality get repaired? The Step Into Reading book didn't say if they did or not.

edited 31st May '15 5:32:49 PM by lalalei2001

It's implied that some (such as Friendship and Family) were rebuilt, but not all of them were. There's also new additions like Tragic Vampire Romance Island

edited 31st May '15 5:56:14 PM by Mattonymy

Is that supposed to be a spoof of Twilight or something?

Ooooh dear.

Excellent post Mattonymy! I SO love spoilers and I already can tell how much I will be enjoying this movie. But I want more!! Please finish the next part soon!

Yeah now's not the time to put spoilers on. :D I didn't read them, but the temptation is strong.

I'm thinking I may have to drop out of this thread now till the movie's out and I've had a chance to watch it for myself....

We have a full 18 more days until the movie is publicly released. If you can't wait that long, it's gonna be tough to avoid spoilers here.

How about we don't post spoilers until the movie is actually out, then?

Haha we could do that. In the meantime I just today am watching the Inside Out tvtropes pages and I am wondering why I didn't get to that sooner.

As long as the spoilers are properly and safely marked as such, I don't see what's the problem. Not to be some Anger or Disgust, but build some willpower up, people!

edited 1st Jun '15 10:24:16 AM by NapoleonDeCheese

Most people here are generally very respective towards using spoiler tags. I posted the full synopsis of Big Hero 6 several months before the film was released, and no one ruined it.

In fact, we appreciated it very much.

Whaaaaat? And I missed it?

To those who were wondering how the Inside Out adventure pack for Disney Infinity 3 was gonna work out it's pretty much a 2d/3d platforming mix (ala 2d Mario and Banjo-Kazooie, albeit simplified a bit).

Power-wise, Joy is basically Princess Peach (she can float), Anger is immune to fire and lava(what with being a hot-head and all), Fear is super fast(run away!), Disgust can jump super high(to keep away from icky stuff on the ground, I suppose), and Sadness can use clouds as platforms (because cloudy/rainy days and sadness go hand in hand).

edited 3rd Jun '15 12:21:53 AM by Dezmo