I see someone has been watching Everything Wrong With!
Those other traits could be 1.) not emotions at all, or 2.) covered under the existing emotions (Love = part of Joy).
I mean some of the point of the film is that there are no real negative emotions, just lack of balance. Disgust seemed like a weird choice though
@kyun: Yeah, I watched the video, but that didn't change my opinion about the movie. I still think they could have made a lot more with emotions - and that's where my idea of Love springing up is: it would spring up from ALL emotions, to form together a cute, pink (or red) emotion called Love, becase it is such a complex emotion that it envelops a bit of everything in it.
Instead, they dumbed it down majorly.
@Tomwithnonumbers: There are negative emotions, but the message more being "It's okay to cry" or "Sad memories are part of life" is okay, but why focus on only 5 emotions? In fact, if the message is that some parts of life will be sad, it's just life, then why add Anger, Fear or Disgust, to begin with? Especially since we're following Joy and Sadness so much.
Two things. First, cognitively speaking, there are six "primal" emotions, with all others formed from some admixture of the others: joy, fear, sadness, disgust, anger, and surprise. And they left out surprise because it's hard to do gags with it since it's so close to fear.
What you're complaining about is both rooted in science and an important thematic component of the movie. Those "negative" emotions are there to serve important functions with utility for your well-being, as the opening of the film attempts to establish. Trying to only experience "positive" emotions is unhealthy and unreasonable.
Second, the finale of the movie is rooted in exactly what you claim to want to see. Riley grows up a little and learns to feel more-complex emotions as a result. Sadness and joy mix to form the complex emotion of melancholy. And we see other memories on the "wall" with similar mixtures.
I agree that it was weird starting with Anger, Fear and Disgust. It opens up with a narration explicitly telling you "these emotions you think are negative are actually good for you" and then goes "except being sad. We all hate sadness right". But then maybe because it's a kid film they felt like they really needed to hammer in the message right from the opening
I can't remember if I've reviewed Inside Out, but there's a lot of things like that through the film. It's full of little narrative imperfections that you can argue are fine because it's a film for kids - but other Pixar films aren't quite like that.
For example, in the revelatory scene with the Imaginary Friend and Sadness, so that Sadness can have her quiet moment Joy just walks out of shot for no reason completely uncharacteristically. If you can't see Joy, then she isn't there so she can't interact and screw up the scene.
Or there's the fact that Joy actually kind of teaches herself the value of Sadness and then goes on to teach Sadness the value of Sadness. When Joy had been the know it all throughout the whole film and really Sadness should have been the one to know her value and teach it to Joy. It's not awful or anything, it doesn't ruin the film, it's just a little imperfection.
And I'm sure someones going to point out that Joy learned the value of Sadness from that conversation with the Imaginary Friend. And you're right, she did. But that's another little niggle, because she learns it and then immediately forgets only to learn it again without really referencing the previous moment (you're left to fill in that blank, and everyone probably did, but thats more us knowing how films should work than something that the film really earned). That whole moment of being sad for the Imaginary Friend is almost doubled up, it hits the same emotional beat twice and I think it would have been stronger if they were one long beat.
To expand a bit on SpectralTime's comment, the six emotions things comes from the early research of Paul Ekman (who was a consultant for the film). That said, other psychologists (including Ekman himself in later years) have proposed up to 27 basic emotions, but adding all those in as individual characters would have made the film very unwieldy, which is why Pixar chose to represent the more complex emotions as the product of interactions between the basic ones (note how the parents' emotions tend to work much more closely together than Riley's).
If you're curious about why Inside Out chose to represent emotions the way it did, here's an interview
with another one of the film's main consultants, Dacher Keltner, as well as this article by both Keltner and Ekman. (And yes, they do also talk about important emotional aspects that the film cut out or simplified, like love, funnily enough).
It\'s a children\'s movie. You need to keep these things more simple than they really would be, or it almost assuredly wouldn\'t work nearly as well, and definitely not for kids.
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Great Concept, Didn't Go All Out
Apparently, nobody is ever responsible for their actions or reactions, they are merely responding to what button the 'little men in their head' push.
And Riley only has five emotions in total inside of her: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger. There is no loyalty, love, no competitive spirit, nothing that could show the myriad of emotions a person can have. Though there are 'islands' of her personality which, frankly, sound much more in-depth and interesting, than the people we follow.
When Joy and Sadness get lost and need to make it back, her remaining three emotions have to take over, leading to Riley having huge mood-swings.
Unfortunately, what sounded like a really cool idea does not go over well in the movie, as they don't fully make use of it. Four out of five emotions are considered negative. The whole Imaginary Childhoodfriend thing sounded interesting, but not too much was made out of it, as with most of the film's ideas. (Even the adults, who tend to know about the more conflicted emotions, only have five emotions inside their head, too?)
I personally would have made a different story out of it. As the movie begins with Riley being born and growing up, it would make sense that she, as a very young child or toddler, would have only five emotions. So her disgust at broccoli (which gets a repeated joke of 'Broccoli is ew' going on, which gets old really fast) or simple emotions makes sense - but it would be cool to see more and more emotions appearing, maybe by splitting off from the five 'main' emotions, as she grows older: say that Disgust and Fear end up creating the Discomfort or Conflicted emotion, Joy and Anger leading to Schadenfreude, Sadness and Anger lead to Frustration, maybe even to the big finale, where Riley grows up and the emotion of Love appears, showing how she's maturing and begins to realize the boys around her and liking them.
Actually, that idea sounds awesome...