Inside Out

Maybe Anger taking over could be portrayed as a good thing: the protagonist snaps and starts yelling about all the ways life has screwed them over, while simultaneously taking steps to right all their wrongs, fight back against all the bullies, fix all the minor things that annoy them, and become a more assertive and proactive person.

The movie itself makes it clear the purpose of all the emotions and how someone is handicapped if they are not working together at the right times. Joy was not strong enough to get Riley off that bus, but Sadness was. Riley got in the most trouble when Anger overpowered Fear.

I'll admit though, a sequel that highlights the concept of "righteous anger" would be daring.

I'm imagining the protagonist as a meek office worker who draws art online as his hobby and goes to Anger Management Therapy. He gets the wrong idea from it, and suppresses his Anger emotion entirely, turning him into an Extreme Doormat who's life just progressively gets worse and worse as a result of not being capable of feeling anger at his situation.

Sounds like a good opposite of what usually happens in "character goes to anger management" stories.

I could get behind that seeing as positive anger is basically ambition, which is important to have, especially in adult life.

A lot of people do forget that anger is not necessarily a negative emotion, One could go so far as to say that no emotional reaction is really negative in and of itself. It can be inappropriate, or out of proportion, and lead to negative consequences though.

I don't really see ambition as being related to anger, though. It's closer, I think, to desire.

Extreme Joy can lead to something like Stepford Smiler too, which is deconstructed by the movie. Refusing to acknowledge emotions is the essential problem. Learning to recognize and control your emotions is the foundation of emotional maturity.

I attended a presentation given by the Inside Out production staff and they said they did extensive research on the psychology of emotions and how there is little uniformity by professionals on exactly how many emotions someone has (some said as little as 3, others said as much as 25). For the purposes of their story they streamlined it to 5, which I think was exceptionally smart for them given that they also established the concept of Core memories AND emotional blending.

I think it could have been interesting, on the few occasions where we got to see into Riley's parents' heads, to show that they had more than five emotions, which would have implied that emotions continued to develop and emerge as one grew older. It'd make sense, given that Joy started out alone, and the others gradually showed up.

It's worth mentioning that while Joy is Riley's dominant emotion, her father's seems to be Anger, and her mother's seems to be Sadness.

Inside Out is a movie that has sort of helped me to understand myself better. It's not only Pixar's best film in at least half a decade, but a particularly well-written one at that. It's a shame that Finding Dory didn't manage to live up to it. After seeing the recent trailer, however, I've got some hope for Cars 3.

Personally, Inside Out is my favorite Pixar film, with Up as my second favorite.

Inside Out is one of the best scripts of recent years, I felt it should have won best original screenplay for sheer creative ingenuity. That said, the weakest part of the film was resorting to cartoon physics to get Joy and Sadness back to HQ. The rest of the film was about how the literal the metaphysics of the mind are, while the whole "copying the fake boyfriend" was something out of a Wile E. Coyote short.

edited 12th Dec '16 11:08:41 PM by KJMackley

Ehhhh, it was a silly part, but it worked for what it was. The movie needed at least a little bit of whimsy in it, especially after it literally killed off its anthropomorphic representation of whimsy. I do agree that it should've gotten at least some awards for its screenplay. Saw it in theatres like three or four times and it still got me every time.

Literally none of those things apply to me. I am a Large Ham soon-to-be college student with no drawing talent whatsoever, and I have a personal policy to almost always vocalize it when something bothers me, because I believe that suppressing your negative feelings on a matter and letting them build up is universally the worse option.

Agreed, as someone with severe depression, the film really spoke to me about letting the dangers of emotional numbness control you. The way her mind just shuts down after feeling like her body's doing things without any emotional control is probably the best representation of what it feels like to be depressed I've seen in any media.

At the time my first thought was "They get it!"

Also while it's a stock aesop that it's not a bad thing to feel sad, most media who give this lesson don't really portray it as a positive either. It's a quick way to get over problems with no consequences, just feel sad for a few minutes and you're good. The film examines why Sadness is a good thing, it gives you empathy and self-reflection, something Joy is by nature against.

Also apparently it's a bit more of a subtle lesson than I thought as I've seen several reviewers completely fail to get that Sadness wasn't corrupting Riley's memories.

Super necro for a sequel teaser:

Well, I'm gonna be interested in how they differentiate Anxiety from Fear, characterwise and function-wise.

Btw, someone made a a work page already. Dang, you guys are fast.

It's interesting because we've seen adults' minds before and everyone had the same five emotions in it.

Is Riley anxious in terms of a disorder? eta: Or do they come and go during puberty?

Edited by dcutter2 on Nov 9th 2023 at 2:48:37 PM

Maybe the original 5 emotions are supposed to be the Grand Council and everyone else is like commander underthem.

Slowing down the end where they were going through the emotions to be feeling about the movie, there were four emotions that weren't linked to the original 5: anxious, envious, embarrassed, and ennui. Potentially, that's what anxiety meant by "we". Whether this is accurate or all there is, guess we'll see down the line. Some of them seems to have some overlap, (anxiety and fear, embarrassed and disgust) and ennui just feels like what happened when the panel stopped functioning. I'm wondering how this new direction will work, since I thought these various emotions were either complexities or combinations of the base 5 (technically 6, but in Inside Out world, Fear and Surprise are combined), or the fact that adult characters still seemed to have base 5 in the original without new ones. I was more expecting if they wanted to add new characters, the base 5 would do a DBZ/Steven Universe style fusion, more than anything.

Edited by HeyMikey on Nov 9th 2023 at 6:58:42 AM

Yeah, the press releases said Anxiety, Ennui, Embarrassment, and Envy are the new emotions. The teaser poster gives a peek at the other three.

If I were to guess, I'd guess the Cyan one is envy, the Pink one is Embarrassed, Orange was already stated to be Anxiety, and the Violet one is Ennui, though I can easily see any of non-Orange colors being Envy, and the Cyan one being Embarrassed.

"Fear if he was an extrovert" is not filling me with confidence about how well they're going to be able to justify the new characters existing, worldbuilding perspective aside.

Also... children are capable of feeling anxious, embarrassed, envious, and bored.

For that matter, envy is awfully close to anger, and Disgust already has handled embarassment.

So, any thoughts how Fear and Disgust's new voices sound?