As children, the movies we often watch portray a few big pictures, both literally and figuratively. If things are going well, you are happy; if you are angry, you will probably get in trouble when you pick a fight, and you aren't really sad unless you lost a favorite toy or a pet ran away from home.
At least, that's what the movies tell us.
They never really explain how it makes sense to feel a bunch of things all at once or sometimes nothing at all. They never explain why we could possibly be sad for different reasons or what happens when something goes so right or so wrong in our lives. We don't have that. We didn't have that. Then Inside Out changed the entire game.
In one of the first previews released for Inside Out, a few simple phrases appear to bring some incredibly complex processes to a level of understanding that presents feelings as both manageable and tangible. "When you feel good, when you feel mad, when you feel sad, never fear, they're all in your head."
These multi-meaning messages present the concepts of feelings both literally and figuratively, as small characters in your head. In Pixar's Inside Out, the audience is taken inside the mind of a young girl, Riley, as she grows and emotionally develops from a baby to a twelve year old. Throughout the movie, we see aspects of the mind come to life such as a train of thought that carries emotions in it's cargo while whizzing by areas of inductive reasoning, speech processing, and different islands of personality. The execution is both brilliant and informative; information is presented in a way that eludes to actual neurological processes while refraining from overwhelming what is most likely the biggest audience of the film, kids. Full of adult and children's humor alike, Inside Out includes ideas and themes central to socio-emotional development and emotion handling for each phase of life, including adulthood.
Inside Out is not just another Pixar film, though. It demonstrates ideas so important to emotional development for parents and children it should be a requirement for all families to see. Though on the surface the characters are animated and personify each emotion in an extraordinary way, their interactions and how they are externalized by the child and received by the parents project a much larger picture.
There is a moment in the film where Riley, the child who possesses the mind that the audience becomes a part of, "loses" Joy and Sadness from her central emotional processing. Her mind is left with only Anger, Disgust, and Fear. Many parents and educators of young children see what they perceive as sadness and joy personified on a daily basis. If a child is happy, they are not usually acting in a way that needs reprimanding, and if a child is sad, an adult will, more often than not, offer comfort and support. It becomes a gray area, though, when a child is feeling more than just joy or sadness, or neither at all. It is confusing, as personified in the film, not only for the child to understand what they are feeling, but also for the parents to understand and try to help. The absence of a primary emotion an adult is used to seeing can often lead to reactions that invalidate a child's emotional experience. How is one supposed to help or know what to do when a child does not even know what they are feeling themselves? In this specific scene in the film, Riley is eating with her parents, and appears to be irritable. She appears angry, and in reality she is, as stated above, missing the two emotions she is used to most. Accustomed to being happy or sad, she does not know how to react to her parents casual conversation, and they in turn do not know how to react to her. Things escalate quickly as her other emotions, fear, disgust, and anger take control and she is reprimanded by her father for being short and, as he perceives, rude. Riley was confused and unsure of what she was feeling and because of this her parents did not take the time to try and help her figure out exactly what it was. They immediately jumped to the conclusion that she was purposefully disagreeing and invalidated her experience by sending her to her room. In this one scene, parents are taught an incredibly powerful lesson. It is often hard to try and understand in the immediate moment what a child is feeling, but it is necessary and worth doing so. If they experience a reaction of anger or disgust when they are simply emotionally disoriented, odds are they will not express themselves in such a way again, when they really just needed the support of trying to understand and cope themselves. Pixar delivers the importance of this mutual understanding beautifully and in a succinct way that each member of the family can learn a tremendous amount from.
In Riley's brain, each emotional character plays an integral role in her emotional reactions and processing of the world. Her experiences are controlled mostly by Joy, but are also often reacted to with Disgust, Anger, Fear, and/or Sadness. When Joy, the most prominent of the group, is no longer able to maintain all of the control, the other emotions are unsure of how to help Riley make sense of a scenario without having an unpleasant experience. When something goes wrong, they panic, "We can fix this! [...] Oh, I wish Joy was here!" Joy spends the entirety of the film determined to keep sadness from "touching" Riley's memories as to preserve their happy state.
Here is where, again, Pixar brings a simple occurrence to an entirely more complex and important level. Joy soon (well, after a while, actually) learns that sometimes sadness needs to win in order for Riley to emotionally experience and understand the world fully. One's core memories need to be built of more than just joy and happiness so they can be drawn upon and help one remember that they have felt this way before and it is possible to feel different again.
If you feel too much or not enough it is OK.
It is okay to feel happy and angry or afraid and sad or disgusted.
Memories can be, and should be, created and composed of a mixture of feelings.
Sometimes you will have memories that are forgotten so new ones can be formed because of all of those that came before it.
Sometimes if you are angry and someone else is angry too it can help you be not so angry.
Sometimes you need to be sad so someone else can be sad with you.
Sometimes being sad together is the most important thing.
It is okay to be sad. It is okay to be afraid. It is okay to feel joy. It is OK to be disgusted. It is okay to be angry.
And therein lies the necessity of this creation. The fact that there is a movie that tells little girls and boys (and teenagers) (and adults) that it is okay to feel different things is revolutionary.
Inside Out is an extraordinary creation that is both heart-wrenching and so very real; if you see one movie this summer, let it be this.