Inside Out

I don't know if this has been brought up before, but something struck me about the design of Riley's emotions:

Anger and Fear are dressed in similar clothes to her dad's Anger and Fear, her Sadness is dressed like her mother's. Was this meant to represent that she takes after her parents? In this case she takes more after her father than her mom?

It's possible. She's seen to be very sporty, and it's implied her father is as well.

I'll agree with whoever said the parents were a bit too stereotypical, though I suppose if you're working with these sort of high concepts it's easiest just to use archetypes for the more out-of-focus characters.

I said above PG, as in more restricted.

Australian ratings system (the one I use) with comparison to usa:

edited 29th Jun '15 3:04:20 PM by SmartGirl333

Today I watched this movie and Minions. I prefered this movie. It had smarter jokes and many interesting and subtle moments (and a few not so subtle ones).

It's kinda strange though, to see the emotions as characters with... well, emotions.

edited 29th Jun '15 7:33:41 PM by Victin

Was there really ever any doubt that this movie would be better than Minions?

Did anyone else notice that in the movie, REM is when all of the memories from throughout the day are sorted and organized into long-term?

That sounds kind of obvious, but I'm trying to note that's what REM does in real life as well- it organizes your memories for long-term.

Like I said, this is a movie that really knows its stuff when it comes to psychology.

so many psychology jokes

the subconscious tho

ok

@spashthebandragon: Well, my father prefered the Minions' movie. In his words, it was a movie made more for children than Inside Out.

@Nes Classic: Yup. I did notice that. I can only wonder how many psychology jokes I missed, though @_@ Though the whole plot is a sequence of these psychological tidbits. With Riley falling into what I assume is depression without Joy and Sadness in her life, and becoming a more emotionally complex person by the end of the movie, with core memories made out of multiple emotions.

Yeah, Inside Out doesn't treat the audience like they're obnoxious two-year-olds, but it's still something a child can enjoy and appreciate. Heck, I just got finished explaining why I think Inside Out's plot was "watered down for kids."

And the Minions just suck, anyways. Not the movie, I haven't seen it, but the characters themselves. They're never funny, and I can't stand characters that make obnoxious noises constantly.

I personally don't have any problems with the Minions. I think they are cute. But I understand why you have that opinion.

Now, ahem, back to Inside Out. Reading last page, I can agree the real life portions of the movie were a bit too simplified. A little more time at school, and a little less tour through Riley's mindscape could be something, even if the tour was only there to show us her mindscape being destroyed, to be rebuilt again as she grows up (though personally I find it hard to watch awkward social interactions sometimes, specially if I know what's causing a character to act in a way that makes me go "Why are you doing that? I like you, stop doing that it's stupid!").

I don't think the ending was too simplified, though. Unless you're a really young child, you can see why running away from home, to another state, is very stupid and dangerous (and if you can't, it's gives your parents a chance to explain why). It even had a scene with Riley walking on the street and Fear going "If someone creepy walks by, we'll cross the street." Sure, the police wasn't involved, but Riley was gone for how long again? I'm almost sure there's a minimum amount of time someone can be missing before you can callthe police, but I don't know American law all that much.

Also... I want to agree that divorcing parents is a common excuse to make a character "angsty", but the only example I can think of right now is Chandler, which would perhaps be a good example of doing that. But I think if Pixar had done it, I'd probably say "that's to be expected", and not be surprised much.

Forty-eight hours, I think, although there are probably exceptions for children.

I was curious about the timeline of that. She left for school in the morning and walked to the bus stop with the ticket she purchased the night before. Realistically, if she was really following through with her plan, she could have been in Reno before anyone realized what had happened. But in the movie, she didn't get on the bus until nightfall. What did she do that whole day? Her mom said she wasn't in school.

EDIT: Or, scratch that. The bus probably just didn't leave until the evening and she really did spend the whole day at the bus stop.

edited 30th Jun '15 8:56:46 AM by Psychobabble6

I was reading Wikipedia and found this article about the movie. I found the story of how the movie came to be very interesting. Also, I bet Riley's treehouse imagination spot of how her new house would look like came from Pete Docter living in an actual treehouse, according to that article.

Saw it. Loved it. Nuff said. It reminded me a lot of Toy Story - an unseen group raising a child alongside their parents, just as devoting and loving, though of course the Emotions even closer to Riley than Woody and the gang were to Andy.

I really liked the connection the movie makes between sadness and empathy.

Plus, while the movie focuses on Riley being unable to feel joy for much of it, the fact that everything she did while depressed also came from being unable to feel sadness as well might be even more unsettling.

Also, am I the only one who thought of Koosalagoopagoop with Bing Bong?

edited 30th Jun '15 10:42:20 AM by KnownUnknown

I'm glad someone else picked up on that, the connection drawn between sadness and empathy! That's one of the reasons the scene where Sadness consoles Bing Bong when he's upset (after Joy utterly fails to do so) is one of my favorite scenes in the movie.

And yeah, he did seem similar to him, though it might have been largely due to his size and similar-sounding voice.

Is that what most people's imaginary friends are like? I thought they'd be more like Batman.

When I first saw the trailer, I was expecting Joy to be the unambiguous Good Emotion, struggling to keep the Bad Emotions in check.

Instead, the film presents a much more complicated take and avoids the narrative pitfall of "good emotions and bad emotions" entirely. If anything, Joy is the problem; her control freak tendencies preventing Riley from processing her hardships in a healthy fashion are what caused Riley to snap.

I really liked that.

I don't know. I don't remember having an imaginary friend, despite having been told they are quite common.

I tried to invent an imaginary friend once but failed. In retrospect, the Mary Sue-ness! It burns!

edited 30th Jun '15 4:13:46 PM by SmartGirl333

I had a crowd of imaginary friends that I would talk to in the bathroom.

Mine tended to be either "me but cooler" or sapient dinosaurs. Which is always cool.

"Pterodactyl that has already invented everything"

The way the movie portays the emotions in relation to Riley is interesting. While the emotions are independent beings with their own emotions (go fig) and desires, they also have a kind of innate instinct of how Riley feels as she feels it - so they don't entirely seem like they're just controlling her.

It's subtle in the movie, but according to our trope page it's supposedly spelled out in one of the tie in books: the emotions feel and are instinctively drawn to follow what Riley needs emotionally before all else.

I guess it makes Joy monopolizing the console as much as she could a little unsettling (though you can still see them switching off and having cooperative roles instinctively before disaster strikes) but the real funny comes from how, given that, Joy was actually sabotaging herself the whole time.

Her reaction to Riley feeling bad about the move was to constantly show her happy memories and make her smile about what she had before. But nostalgia is a naturally bittersweet emotion - simultaneously enjoying what you had while realizing that you don't have it any more. Her approach could have only ever made Sadness more and more drawn to helping out.

edited 1st Jul '15 12:24:16 AM by KnownUnknown

Each emotion has their own little emotion-world inside their head, as do the emotions in THAT emotion-world, and so on and so forth.

I feel like the emotions not strictly being confined to acting like their namesakes might be subtly demonstrating how emotions in general are more complicated than how people tend to think of them. They also all seem to be affected by the general feeling that Riley needed to be feeling at that moment. One of my favorite scenes to demonstrate this was near the beginning on the first night Riley spends in the house, when Joy, disheartened and unable to come up with anything to keep their hopes up, shrinks back away from the console while all the other emotions go to town on it, all the while mumbling about how they can't live there. Then, when Riley's mom comes in and asks her to keep being their happy girl, everyone stops and Joy perks back up, moving back to the head position. The happiness rubs off on more or less all the other emotions (not so much Sadness, but that's probably hinting at the crux of the movie as a whole and of Sadness's role in the situation), and they all agree to try to be happy. The dominant feeling is what prescribes how the emotions react to the situation.

I think another good example is when Anger, Disgust, and Fear are discussing the idea to run away. The thing I found most interesting there is how Fear is protesting the whole time, but he is unable to put up much of a fight—Riley is more angry about her situation and disgusted at what she feels she is dealing with than afraid of what might happen to her if she runs away. Or, perhaps, she is not at all thinking through what could happen to her. Notice how Fear doesn't offer any of the potential consequences as a rebuttal to the suggestion of running away? That's because Riley is unable to think logically about the situation and thus has her mind set only on how she was much happier in Minnesota.

I really can't stress enough how much I love all these little things in the movie. I saw it a second time the other night and I might just keep going back to see it until it's no longer in theaters, I love it that much.

edited 1st Jul '15 6:09:55 AM by Odd1