inside out movie review psychology

Inside Out: Emotional Truths by Way of Pixar

"inside out" proves true to cognitive, developmental, and clinical psychology..

Posted June 24, 2015 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

Dr. Janina Scarlet reviewed the film Inside Out and wanted to share her thoughts with Psychology Today readers. by Janina Scarlet

Inside Out is a movie I’d been waiting for a year to see and, once again, Pixar did not disappoint. This is a movie I’m going to be assigning to many of my patients and doctoral students as a way to demonstrate important psychological principles.

Warning: some spoilers of the movie ahead.

The movie is about an 11-year-old girl, Riley, originally from Minnesota, who moves to San Francisco with her parents. The leading characters of the movie, however, aren’t Riley and her family, but Riley’s primary emotions: Happiness (Joy), Sadness, Fear , Anger , and Disgust. These emotions demonstrate what it might be like in the mind of an 11-year-old girl who struggles with having to move to a different city, away from her friends, away from her hockey league, and has a hard time pretending to be happy for her parents.

What’s really powerful about this film is how accurate it is to cognitive, developmental, and clinical psychology. The 5 emotions used in this film are in fact 5 of the 6 scientifically validated universal emotions (the 6th one being surprise). Psychologist and scientist, Paul Ekman, is most known for his work with universal emotions as he traveled around the world and found that these were present in every culture and presented in the same way through the same facial expressions around the world. Ekman’s work has been used for psychology research, as well as for the US government, and even inspired the popular television series, ‘Lie to Me’.

Other concepts displayed in this movie included the conversion of short to long-term memory . When a memory is seen as salient or relevant enough to us, or when it has been repeated enough times, the brain messengers, dopamine and glutamate, ensure the long-term encoding of that memory. Think of these messengers as computer coders or awesome IT support team – they write the code to ensure that our brain computer is up to date with the new information. Other concepts briefly covered in the movie include psychological changes of reaching/approaching puberty , psychological stressors, family psychology, inductive and deductive reasoning (thinking like Sherlock Holmes by using logic, reasoning, and observation to reach a conclusion), and many others.

Of all 5 of Riley’s emotions, Joy seems to be the leader, she keeps the others in check but reminds the viewers that all of them have an important function. She states that Disgust keeps Riley safe from being poisoned, Fear keeps her safe from a catastrophe by imagining worst case scenarios, Anger protects her from others and also allows her to be a better hockey player, while Joy ensures that Riley is happy. However, Joy fails to see the importance of Sadness and tries to shoo Sadness away from anything Riley-related, forbidding this emotion in every way possible. She even draws a circle on the floor and makes Sadness stay inside it, forbidding her to leave or to touch any of Riley’s memories, so as not to taint them with sad memories.

As if Riley’s mind trying to keep Sadness at bay wasn’t enough, Riley’s parents put an additional pressure on her, especially when her mother asks her to “keep smiling” for her dad. Essentially, Riley’s mom, without meaning to do so, communicates to Riley that being sad about the move was not ok and that she needs to pretend to be happy to support her father through this.

Unfortunately, Joy’s good intentions backfire when Riley is unable to receive the support she so desperately needs to help her with adjusting to her new environment. In fact, Riley initially seems to be having symptoms of an Adjustment Disorder with Depressed Mood, where she has a hard time coping with her move, she withdraws from her parents and old friends, she misses school, and even tries to run away. By being unable to experience her sadness about all these changes and pretending that she was ok, Riley ends up being angry, anxious, and irritable, getting into a fight with her parents and her best friend, before shutting down altogether. In fact, it looks like Riley’s potential Adjustment Disorder might have turned into a full-blown Major Depressive Episode. (I’m saying, “might have” because in order to be diagnosed, the symptoms need to have lasted for 2 weeks or more, and we don’t know how long Riley’s symptoms actually lasted).

What messages does this movie send to its viewers?

Many, actually, but perhaps the most important one is this – our emotions are all important, every single one of them. They all serve an important function and we cannot selectively feel some but not others. It’s an “all-or-none” deal. If we numb sadness, we also numb joy. We need to openly experience all our emotions, and that includes sadness, as painful as it may be sometimes. Sadness allows for connection, when we see someone else feeling sad, we might feel sad too (this emotion is called empathy) and might want to alleviate their sadness (this is compassion). When we stay with this individual and share our emotions together, the resonating effect can produce a healing experience. That is exactly what we see when Sadness comforts Riley’s imaginary friend, Bing Bong, and also when Riley is able to share her sadness with her parents.

In fact, when we are sad, our body and facial expression cue the people around us that we need help – the tears running down our face, the pupil dilation, the non-threatening posture, all of this signals others that we could use some support. And at the same time, the people around us might then experience a bitter-sweet sensation of compassion, caused by an activation of the compassion centers of our brain (the insula and the anterior cingulate cortex, among other structures), and the warmth of the heart caused by a release of a special “cuddle” hormone , oxytocin (so called because it is released when we want to or are in the process of hugging someone, or similar actions).

The movie doesn’t stop there; it ends with a bang by reminding us that we can experience multiple (and even contradictory) emotions at the same time, such as happiness and sadness. The movie also shows that everyone experiences these emotions, as they are, in fact, universal. This demonstrates a psychological concept of common humanity, or the idea that other people are just like us, they might struggle with the same emotions, insecurities, heartbreaks, and neuroses as we do, further validating our internal experiences.

Overall, ‘Inside Out’ was amazing. I highly recommend it and would love to hear your opinions on it.

Dr. Janina Scarlet is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist, a scientist, and a full time geek. She uses Superhero Therapy to help patients with anxiety , depression , chronic pain , and PTSD at the Center for Stress and Anxiety Management and Sharp Memorial Hospital. Dr. Scarlet also teaches at Alliant International University, San Diego. Her book, Superhero Therapy, is expected to be released in July 2016 with Little, Brown Book Group.

Original post at Superhero Therapy: Psychology of "Inside Out." Shared at the author's request, with permission.

Travis Langley, Ph.D. , a professor at Henderson State University, is the author of Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight.

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"Inside Out," a comedy-adventure set inside the mind of an 11-year old girl, is the kind of classic that lingers in the mind after you've seen it, sparking personal associations. And if it's as successful as I suspect it will be, it could shake American studio animation out of the doldrums it's been mired in for years. It avoids a lot of the cliched visuals and storytelling beats that make even the best Pixar movies, and a lot of movies by Pixar's competitors, feel too familiar. The best parts of it feel truly new, even as they channel previous animated classics (including the works of Hayao Miyazaki ) and explore situations and feelings that everyone has experienced to some degree.

The bulk of the film is set inside the brain of young Riley ( Kaitlyn Dias ), who's depressed about her mom and dad's decision to move them from Minnesota to San Francisco, separating her from her friends. Riley's emotions are determined by the interplay of five overtly "cartoonish" characters: Joy ( Amy Poehler ), a slender sprite-type who looks a little bit like Tinkerbell without the wings; Sadness (Phyllis Smith), who's soft and blue and recessive; Fear ( Bill Hader ), a scrawny, purple, bug-eyed character with question-mark posture; Disgust ( Mindy Kaling ), who's a rich green, and has a bit of a " Mean Girls " vibe; and Anger ( Lewis Black ), a flat-topped fireplug with devilish red skin and a middle-manager's nondescript slacks, fat tie and short-sleeved shirt. There's a master control room with a board that the five major emotions jostle against each other to control. Sometimes Joy is the dominant emotion, sometimes Fear, sometimes Sadness, etc., but never to the exclusion of the others. The controller hears what the other emotions are saying, and can't help but be affected by it.

The heroine's memories are represented by softball-sized spheres that are color-coded by dominant emotion (joy, sadness, fear and so forth), shipped from one mental location to another through a sort of vacuum tube-type system, then classified and stored as short-term memories or long-term memories, or tossed into an "abyss" that serves the same function here as the trash bin on a computer. ("Phone numbers?" grouses a worker in Riley's memory bank. "We don't need these. They're in her phone!") Riley's mental terrain has the jumbled, brightly colored, vacu-formed design of mass market toys or board games, with touches that suggest illustrated books, fantasy films (including Pixar's) and theme parks aimed at vacationing families (there are "islands" floating in mental space, dedicated to subjects that Riley thinks about a lot, like hockey). There's an imaginary boyfriend, a nonthreatening-teen-pop-idol type who proclaims, "I would die for Riley. I live in Canada."  A "Train of Thought" that carries us through Riley's subconscious evokes one of those miniature trains you ride at zoos; it chugs through the air on rails that materialize in front of the train and disintegrate behind it.

The story kicks into gear when Riley attends her new school on the first day of fifth grade and flashes back to a memory that's color-coded as "joyful," but ends up being reclassified as "sad" when Sadness touches it and causes Riley to cry in front of her classmates. Sadness has done this once before; she and Joy are the two dominant emotions in the film. This makes sense when you think about how nostalgia—which is what Riley is mostly feeling as she remembers her Minnesota past—combines these two feelings. A struggle between Joy and Sadness causes "core memories" to be knocked from their containers and accidentally vacuumed up, along with the two emotions, and spat into the wider world of Riley's emotional interior. The rest of the film is a race to prevent these core memories from being, basically, deleted. Meanwhile, back at headquarters, Fear, Anger and Disgust are running the show.

It's worth pointing out here that all these characters and locations, as well as the supporting players that we meet inside Riley's brain, are figurative. They are visual representations of ineffable sensations, a bit like the characters and symbols on Tarot cards. And this is where "Inside Out" differs strikingly from other Pixar features. it is not, strictly speaking, fantasy or science fiction, categories that describe the rest of the company's output. It's more like an extended dream that interprets itself as it goes along, and it's rooted in reality. The world beyond Riley's mind looks pretty much like ours, though of course it's represented by stylized, computer-rendered drawings. Nothing happens there that could not happen in our world. Most of the action is of a type that a studio executive would call "low stakes": Riley struggles through her first day at a new school, gets frustrated by her mom and dad pushing her to buck up, storms to her room and pouts, etc.

The script draws clear connections between what happens to Riley in San Francisco (and what happened to her when she was little) and the figurative or metaphorical representations of those same experiences that we see inside her mind, a parallel universe of fond memories, repressed pain, and slippery associations. The most endearing and heartrending moments revolve around Bing-Bong ( Richard Kind ), the imaginary friend that Riley hasn't thought about in years. He's a creature of pure benevolence who only wants Riley to have fun and be happy. His body is made of cotton candy, he has a red wagon that can fly and that leaves a rainbow trail, and his serene acceptance of his obsolescence gives him a heroic dimension. He is a Ronin of positivity who still pledges allegiance to the Samurai that released him years ago.

Written by Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley from a story by Ronnie del Carmen and Pete Docter , and directed by Docter ("Monsters, Inc." and " Up "), "Inside Out" has the intricate interplay of image and sound that you've come to expect from Pixar. It also boasts the company's characteristic, three-leveled humor aimed at, respectively, very young children, older kids and adults, and pop culture buffs who are always on the lookout for a clever homage (a separate class of obsessive). There's nothing quite like hearing a theater packed with people laughing at the same gag for different reasons. A scene where Bing-Bong, Joy and Sadness race to catch the Train of Thought is exciting for all, thanks to the elegant way it's staged, and funny mainly because of the way Poehler, Smith and Kind say the lines. But adults will also appreciate the no-fuss way that it riffs on poetic and psychological concepts, and aficionados of the histories of animation and fine art will dig how the filmmakers tip their hats to other artistic schools. The characters get to Imagination Land by taking a shortcut through Abstract Thought, which turns them into barely-representational characters with smashed-up Cubist features, then mutates them into flat figurines that suggest characters in a 1960s short film by UPA, or an animation company based in Eastern Europe . There are very sly throwaway gags as well, like a character's comment that facts and opinions look "so similar," and a pair of posters glimpsed in a studio where dreams and nightmares are produced: "I'm Falling For a Very Long Time Into a Pit" and "I Can Fly!"

It's clear that the filmmakers have studied actual psychology, not the Hollywood movie version. The script initially seems as if it's favoring Joy's interpretation of what things mean, and what the other emotions ought to "do" for Riley. But soon we realize that Sadness has just as much of value to contribute, that Anger, Fear and Disgust are useful as well, and that none of them should be prized to the exclusion of the rest. The movie also shows how things can be remembered with joy, sadness, anger, fear or disgust, depending on where we are in the narrative of our lives and what part of a memory we fixate on. There's a great moment late in the story where we "swipe" through one of Riley's most cherished memories and see that it's not just sad or happy: it's actually very sad, then less sad, then finally happy. We might be reminded of Orson Welles' great observation, "If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."

The film is even more remarkable for how it presents depression: so subtly but unmistakably that it never has to label it as depression. Riley is obviously depressed, and has good reason to be. The abyss where her core memories have been dumped is also a representation of depression. True to life, Riley stays in her personal abyss until she's ready to climb out of it. There's no magic cure that will make the pain go away. She just has to be patient, and feel loved.

A wise friend told me years ago that we have no control over our emotions, only over what we choose to do about them, and that even if we know this, it can still be hard to make good decisions, because our feelings are so powerful, and there are so many of them fighting to be heard. "Inside Out" gets this. It avoids the sorts of maddening, self-serving, binary statements that kids always hate hearing their parents spout: Things aren't so bad. You can decide to be happy. Look on the bright side. Even as we root for Riley to find a way out of her despair, we're never encouraged to think that she's just being childish, or that she wouldn't be taking everything so seriously if she were older. We feel for her, and with her. She contains multitudes.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Inside Out (2015)

102 minutes

Amy Poehler as Joy (voice)

Mindy Kaling as Disgust (voice)

Bill Hader as Fear (voice)

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Kaitlyn Dias as Riley (voice)

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Pixar has a proud tradition of taking things that are incapable of expressing human emotion—robots, toys, rats, cars—and imagining a world where they can, in fact, feel. The studio’s most recent effort, the box-office topping and critically acclaimed Inside Ou t , takes viewers inside the head of a young girl named Riley, imagining what it would be like if her feelings could feel.

While Inside Out is ultimately an animated children’s movie, the perfectionists at Pixar (which is owned by the Walt Disney Company) still took the task of personifying emotions very seriously. To ensure they translated complex psychological issues accurately and clearly, they turned to two of the leading minds in the study of emotions, Paul Ekman and Dacher Keltner. We recently had a chance to speak with Keltner, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley, who shared with us what the filmmakers got right, how it can change the way Westerners think about emotion, and what the inside of a lustful college student’s mind might look like.

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Pixar's 'Inside Out' Is A Mind-Opening Masterpiece

David Edelstein

Director Pete Docter had the idea for this movie a little over five years ago after he saw his own 11-year-old daughter become sad and tried to imagine how the world looked through her eyes.

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• Review: <i>Inside Out</i> Takes a Mind-Blowing Trip Inside the Brain

Review: Inside Out Takes a Mind-Blowing Trip Inside the Brain

T he most profound—as well as profoundly good —Pixar movies are the ones that seem the least plausible as story pitches. Consider Up (crushed by encroaching development, old man flies away with his house) and WALL-E (environmental wasteland, nice robot). Now, there’s Inside Out , which defies the conventions of family movies by being an animated comedy about brain chemistry and situational depression.

That makes it perhaps the craziest movie Pixar has ever come up with. Imagine Fellini using animation to create a narrative starring the limbic system, with diversions to the subconscious (“where they take all the troublemakers”), treacherous trips into abstract thinking and rides on the highly erratically scheduled train of thought. From a story hatched by co-directors Peter Docter ( Up, Monsters, Inc. ) and Ronaldo del Carmen, Inside Out is nearly hallucinogenic, entirely beautiful and easily the animation studio’s best release since 2010’s Toy Story 3. Stylistically Inside Out is nothing like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood , but for its scope in examining the maturation process, it might well be called Childhood .

The central human character is an 11 year-old only child named Riley Anderson (voiced by Kaityn Dias) who loves hockey and her parents, but the story is mainly told from the perspective of five core human emotions. Joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust are all depicted as characters that live within Riley. (Usually scientists go with happy when they’re talking about emotions, but Joy makes a better name for anyone voiced by Amy Poehler. Talk about type-casting; you wonder if the movie was built around her Parks and Recreation persona). These five characters move in and out of control of the central keyboard of Riley’s brain until a crisis is set in motion by the Anderson family’s relocation from Minnesota to San Francisco. While the movers dawdle and Dad’s “investors” jerk his startup chain, the Andersons live in an empty, narrow, dirty house. (Even the perkiest real estate agent would stretch to call this a Victorian, but in the nation’s hottest real estate market, it probably cost at least $1.5 million.)

No wonder Riley has trouble summoning her joy, especially facing a new school. Sadness (the wonderful Phyllis Smith, from The Office ), blue-skinned and bound up in a tight turtleneck sweater, keeps touching and thus sullying all the old good memories; soon, Anger (Lewis Black) moves into the driver’s seat, with Fear (Bill Hader) hovering near by and Disgust (Mindy Kahling) snarking from the other side. Riley plunges into a depression and the movie becomes a race against time as her good memories crumble and misery closes in. In the Pixar vision of depression, Joy and Riley’s imaginary friend from her earliest years, Bing Bong (Richard Kind) are reduced to tiny pinpoints, bright lights in sea of coal-colored thoughts and memories. They have to literally climb over the misery to get out.

The brain itself has components that look like a giant gumball machine. Riley’s various islands of personality (friends, family, hockey) could be the kind of alien outpost where Han Solo has drinks. There is an abyss, naturally, but overall this is a place of little order and great mystery, which you might not expect from Pixar, given its propensity for explaining away say, the sources of scary dreams ( Monsters, Inc .). To be lost in its bowels is terrifying even for perky Joy. One of the movie’s best gags is the snoring, red-nosed hulk hidden away in the subconscious. To see the complexity of the human brain laid out in animation, right down to arching pathways of light that look a lot like synapses, is mind-blowing in the same way Fantasia is mind-blowing.

But what makes the movie so rich and enlightening, even for an adult well acquainted with their own blue periods, is the depiction of emotions not as at war with each other but rather in a constant juggling act to keep their human going. Riley’s mother and father, voiced by Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan, have their own five-character emotion parade. It is true that Riley’s Disgust eggs on Anger, and that Joy, a bossy hedonist, would rather Sadness stay within the chalk circle she draws for her. But the emotions are all in this together, in support of Riley. One of Inside Out’s great triumphs is Joy’s dawning realization about the need for balance and the gifts that unmasked Sadness can bring, including the support of one’s loved ones.

Sadness is of course, particularly well suited to movie theaters, which are great places to cry. (As Joy urges Sadness to get out of her funk, she keeps reminding her of “that funny movie where the dog died”). Which brings me to a sidenote: For four years I shared a movie beat with TIME’s legendary critic Richard Corliss, who died in April. Richard could be territorial. A Pixar movie was a bone he never wanted to give up (unless, well… Cars 2 ). For me Inside Out was tinged with sadness that he is no longer here to see it. What would he have loved best? The sly joke that Anger is the designated newspaper reader in the group? (Choice headline: “Replaced! No Friends for Riley!”) Or the way Riley’s memory service team clears out all her piano lessons except for “Chopsticks” and “Heart and Soul?” Or perhaps the wistful lyrical pas de deux when Joy dances to one of Riley’s favorite memories of skating on a frozen Minnesota lake? Yes, to all of them, the sorrow and the joy.

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Inside Out: a crash course in PhD philosophy of self that kids will get first

Pixar’s latest animation is a remarkably intelligent treatment of one of the most complicated and confusing issues in philosophy: the self

When you go to see a Pixar film you know you’re going to see something clever, funny and inventive. What you don’t expect, however, is to see a remarkably intelligent treatment of one of the most complicated and confusing philosophical issues of them all: the self.

I’ve written a PhD thesis on this and later a book , and whenever I talk about it, I go on about how the most credible and widely accepted theory (among philosophers, at least) is counter-intuitive and hard to grasp. Then some cartoon comes along which makes the key points intelligible to children. Inside Out has turned my world upside down.

The film takes us inside the mind of an 11-year-old girl, Riley, where five homunculi – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust – are literally pushing all her buttons. Most critics have focused on how this neat device teaches difficult lessons in emotional maturity, most notably how you can’t be happy all the time and that sadness has its role to play too.

That’s true. But, albeit in schematic and simplified form, the film also reflects some of the most important truths about what it means to be an individual person.

The first of these is that there isn’t actually a single, unified you at all. Your brain is not a little world full of anthropomorphic creatures, of course. But it is made up of various different, often competing impulses. You are simply how it all comes together, the sum of your psychic parts.

This, however, is just the first crack at the myth of the enduring, unified self. What the film also shows is that each of these parts is impermanent. Riley’s personality is represented by a series of islands that reflect what matters most to her: friendship, honesty, family, goofiness and hockey. But as life becomes difficult, each of these in turns threatens to crumble. And that is how it is in the real world: as we grow and change and life takes it toll, some of the things that matter most to us will endure, others will fall away and new ones will come in their place.

The third key element in understanding the self is that what keeps this all together is memory. At first, it seems like the film is going to over-simplify this, presenting memories as little movies, experiences that are captured, stored and played back. But as it progresses it gets more complicated. It becomes clear that not only do many memories simply get lost – even ones that were once most precious – others change their character as we do. For memories to do their work, they need to be nurtured and understood.

What it all adds up to is a picture of the self as something which coheres into a single narrative but which has nothing permanent and unchanging at its core. We are forever in flux, always in the process of growing out of what we once were into what we are to become next.

I think the reason this can be conveyed in a children’s film is that, in many ways kids are more receptive to this message than adults. Children change so rapidly that they might be able to understand the idea of impermanence more readily than adults, whose self-conception has often ossified. Kids have no problem imagining that they might grow up to be quite different, while adults assume they are stuck being the person they have turned out to be.

The best children’s films often serve a dual purpose. They help kids to grow up but they also remind adults of what they have lost by doing so. Inside Out succeeds brilliantly on both counts.

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Does Inside Out accurately capture the mind of an 11-year -old girl? A child psychologist weighs in

Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University

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Jane Timmons-Mitchell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Pixar’s new film Inside Out provides an interesting spin on how to understand what’s going on in the mind of an 11-year-old girl. The bulk of the action takes place inside protagonist Riley’s head, where a group of emotions (Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger) work together (or not) to direct her behavior.

The film’s primary conflict is a compelling one: it depicts Riley’s response to a major, life-changing event – a cross-country move. But from the perspective of a practicing clinical child psychologist with 30 years of experience, it’s only partly successful in accurately depicting why children react the way they do.

Most tweens would have difficulty with a cross-country move at the start of middle school, and Riley is, understandably, sad, angry, disgusted and fearful. She loses interest in things she used to like to do. The fact that her parents are also stressed, making it difficult for them to pick up on her angst until it is almost too late, also rings true.

Riley’s life appears to be run by her emotions. The character Joy is chief among them: it’s a core part of who she is, and a great deal of energy is expended to keep her feeling and acting in positive ways. Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger all have roles, and their order of appearance makes sense, developmentally.

Joy not only tries to keep the other emotions in check, but she’s also in charge of making sure that the core memories – which seem to define key areas of Riley’s functioning – are intact. A lot of time is devoted to trying to keep Sadness away, since she could taint these happy memories.

But the notion that memories can be preserved unaltered is not in line with most current research thinking. Childhood traumatic events can be remembered accurately or inaccurately , while the field of eyewitness testimony is rife with examples of memories that are moderated by perception or time.

Furthermore, the emotions and behaviors of Riley are depicted using the same framework that adults often use to interpret their emotions. This misses the mark.

Children aren’t simply little adults; as developmental psychologists like Urie Bronfenbrenner have noted , it’s important to take into account the extent to which children are embedded in systems like family and school, where parents and teachers play a huge role in teaching children Riley’s age how to mediate their feelings.

Most 11-year-olds can tell you that they have feelings – and can name a few (though most would not name Disgust) – but more often than not, these feelings can overwhelm them. Adults, then, help them understand and make sense of their feelings, which is a gradual process.

In the end, the different characters for the emotions are altogether too mechanistic. It might be a nice way to show children that they have feelings, but it’s not really the way feelings work.

The film does have some signature strengths. The most authentic aspect of the film was the portrayal of conversations among Riley and her parents. Seeing her mother’s and then her father’s “inner emotions” react (like Riley, the parents also have characters assigned to their emotions) was a wonderful mapping of the kind of patterns that we see whenever families interact.

For example, at the dinner table, Mom gives Dad a look that’s intended to signal that he needs to take her side during an argument with Riley.

Dad’s emotions frantically discuss what she might mean. (“I wasn’t paying attention.” “Did we leave the toilet seat up again?” “Wait for her to do it again.”) Meanwhile, Mom’s (annoyed) emotions decide that she would have been better off with a former suitor. The humor with which it was handled was truly refreshing.

Similarly, one of the best aspects of the film is that Joy realizes that she must work with Sadness to enrich Riley’s emotional life. This is an age-appropriate realization; increased empathy in girls, especially, occurs at around Riley’s age .

Riley has a lot of experiences coming her way, as evidenced by the installation of the new control console at the end of the film with a red button labeled “puberty.” Like most adolescents, she will experience highs and lows, as her friends become more central and she discovers romantic feelings.

And it also sounds like groundwork being laid for a sequel centered on Riley’s pubescent years.

To read about whether or not Inside Out accurately depicts how memory works, click here.

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Review: Inside Out is a work of simple genius

Pixar's films, at their best, are wonderful not just for their inventiveness, or humour, or animation, but for how they make you think. Toys coming to life, monsters under the bed, or stories told from the point of view of bugs, fish, cars -- theirs is the stuff of a billion children's overactive imaginations. So it's fitting that Inside Out , the studio's latest, returns to that tradition with its most universal and simple idea yet: going inside the child's mind itself.

Inside Out follows Riley, a 12-year-old girl dismayed when her family packs up and moves from snowy Minnesota to San Francisco. (It's never made explicit, but talk of investors, growing stubble and scruffy T-shirts suggests her Dad works at a tech start up.) All that's slightly beside the point, because we see comparatively little of Riley: the majority of the action takes place inside her mind, which is populated by the effervescent Joy (Amy Poehler), mopey Sadness (Phyllis Smith), hot-headed Anger (Lewis Black), gangly Fear (Bill Hader) and trendy Disgust (Mindy Kaling). Think the Beano 's Numskulls, but brighter coloured. Like the crew of the Enterprise, this fivesome control Riley's thoughts and behaviour, with the ultimate aim of creating memories, little glowing orbs that roll in after each new experience before being whisked off to Long Term or -- in the case of a few formative experiences -- becoming Core Memories, which generate the all-important Islands Of Personality. As a child, Joy is used to ruling the roost, before the dislocation of moving home sets off a crisis, as Joy and Sadness are zapped off into the depths of Riley's mind, leaving only Anger, Fear and Disgust in charge. Has adolescence ever been summed up so neatly?

This introduction is whizzed through in an inventive few opening minutes and remarkable for its clarity and simplicity; director Pete Docter has a history of great openings – his last film was the Oscar-winning Up -- and this is similarly successful in its set-up. From there we're off on a journey through Joy's mind taking in such delights as Imaginationland, Abstract Thought and the caves of the Subconscious. Docter consulted real psychologists on the story , and it shows -- Inside Out 's dealings with complexity of emotion and behaviour is immensely clever, and rarely misses a beat. The script is funny too, ranging from broad slapstick to smarter gags for the adults. But most of all, the film's secret is in its universality, finding delightfully simple gags in the everyday (in a delightful sequence, we discover the reason you can't get that annoyingly catchy tune out of your head).

As with Up however, the real power of Inside Out isn't in its humour, but in its maturity; the second half of the film is much more downbeat, with certain scenes that will leave even the hardest-hearted reaching for tissues. (I can only imagine how devastating it would be if you have kids; Docter was inspired to write the film by his daughter's adolescence, and there's a palpable sense of loss that lingers long afterwards.)

It's not perfect; by modern standards Inside Out is refreshingly lacking any excess, but zipping from scene to scene you're occasionally left wanting more; more jokes, more emotion, more explanation -- particularly during a speedy denouement. (On a minor note, it's also a little tiresome, a week after Ant-Man , to see yet another film set in San Francisco.) It's a shame we're mostly confined to Riley's mind, as when the film does veer inside the heads of others, it finds some of its best moments (it's worth staying for the credits sequence for more of these). You get the feeling there is ample ground there for a sequel.

But ultimately, when the credits roll, and your smiles fade, you can't help but be left with a bittersweet feeling. That's the thing: like childhood, no Pixar film lasts forever.

Inside Out is out now.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK

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‘Inside Out,’ Pixar’s New Movie From Pete Docter, Goes Inside the Mind

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By Brooks Barnes

• May 20, 2015

EMERYVILLE, CALIF. — John Lasseter, a notepad in hand, settled into his seat in a dimly lit screening room at Pixar headquarters here in July 2012. Mr. Lasseter, Pixar’s chief creative officer, was there to evaluate progress on “Inside Out,” a new film set inside an 11-year-old girl’s mind. Had the filmmaking team cracked the unusual concept?

It did not take long for the air to frost over. “We got up and said, ‘We’re not going to show you a screening because the film is not working,’ ” recalled Pete Docter, who turned to “Inside Out” after his Oscar-winning “Up.”

Talk about guts: Mr. Docter’s movie had already been in the works for more than two years at that point. “I saw John do this,” Mr. Docter said, scowling and crossing his arms. “It was scary. Not happy.”

Solving creative puzzles is a Pixar hallmark, and the studio may have done it again. In its finished form, “Inside Out,” arriving in theaters on June 19, is expected to become Pixar’s 15th consecutive blockbuster. (Analysts predict domestic ticket sales alone of at least $250 million.) The bittersweet film, which received a euphoric response from critics at the Cannes Film Festival, could also become an Oscar force, and not just in the animation category.

But a triumphant “Inside Out” would mean more to Disney-owned Pixar than money and trophies. Success would prove that the little studio’s soul is undeniably intact despite worries by some fans and critics about a brain drain and an increased reliance on sequels. Last year, for the first time in nine years, Pixar did not release a film because of problems with an entry called “The Good Dinosaur.” (Its director was replaced, and the film is to arrive on Nov. 25.) Increasing the stakes: The rival DreamWorks Animation has struggled badly in the time Pixar has been absent, leading to chatter that the computer-animation genre is in a funk.

“The pressure on ‘Inside Out’ is tremendous,” said Maija Burnett, the director of the character animation program at California Institute of the Arts, Mr. Docter’s alma mater. “Audiences now have extra-high expectations of computer animation as an art form.”

Notably, “Inside Out” is Pixar’s first original film to come to fruition almost entirely without Steve Jobs, a Pixar founder who was a powerful presence at the studio until his death in 2011. The Pixarians also had to make do with less Mr. Lasseter, who in recent years worked to fix a floundering Walt Disney Animation. (He accomplished it in 2013 with a little film called “Frozen.”)

“For a while, there was a sense in the halls like, ‘Oh, Daddy has a new wife and family down in Los Angeles, and he loves them more than us,’ ” said Mr. Docter, who joined Pixar in 1994, becoming its third animator. “John has done a really great job balancing, an almost superhuman job, but for a while he was inevitably not part of the films on a day-to-day basis as much.”

Mr. Docter, 46, is not the type to swoop in with stereotypical director bravado — stand back, I’ve got this. A gentle Minnesotan who comes across like Tom Hanks in “Big,” Mr. Docter is more likely to talk about his self-doubt.

“I’m not the typical take-charge, silver-backed gorilla director,” Mr. Docter said over a breakfast of eggs and fried chicken at a greasy spoon near Pixar last month. (Yes, fried chicken.) “I often think I’m on the verge of getting fired. And then I’ll think, well, maybe I should just quit: ‘It’s been nice, guys. I’ll miss you.’ ”

But those are just voices in his head.

“Inside Out” tells the story of Joy, Fear, Disgust, Anger and Sadness. They run a girl named Riley from a control center inside her mind, stepping in to keep her safe or make her feel happy or stand up for what’s right — all except lethargic, lumpy Sadness. Nobody knows why she is there. Could she actually be bad for Riley?

Then, just as Riley’s family moves to a new city, Sadness and Joy (voiced by Phyllis Smith of “The Office” and Amy Poehler) get lost in the far reaches of Riley’s mind, a through-the-looking-glass place populated with dancing cupcakes, a French fry forest and an out-of-work imaginary friend made of cotton candy. As the lost pair navigate regions like Long Term Memory and Abstract Thought in a quest to return to the controls, Fear, Disgust and Anger (Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling, Lewis Black) remain in charge.

Stand back: The result is a petulant, prepubescent Riley.

An animated movie that tries to make sense of the adolescent mind? Even for Pixar, it was an ambitious proposition. Too cartoony, and adults would probably revolt. Too intellectual, and children would find it boring. (Cue Disgust.)

Like “Up,” about a septuagenarian coping with the loss of his wife, “Inside Out” seeks to both entertain and leave viewers with a deeper understanding of themselves. The success of “Up,” which took in $731 million worldwide in 2009, is one reason Pixar was willing to let Mr. Docter tackle another sophisticated story, part of which will undoubtedly go over the heads of young viewers. “Inside Out” again finds Mr. Docter grappling with loss — the end of childhood bliss.

“We knew from the first pitch of this idea that it had the potential to be really special, but in the same breath we knew it would be really hard,” Mr. Lasseter said. “It turned out to be one of the most difficult films we’ve ever made.” As for the bumps along the way, he said: “We’re always tearing up work and starting over. At Pixar, we trust our process, and we trust each other.”

If anyone could pull it off, said Ed Catmull, Pixar’s president, it was Pete Docter. Perhaps more than anyone at the studio except Mr. Lasseter, the shy Mr. Docter is imagination incarnate. “But it’s not just creativity,” Mr. Catmull said. “Pete has always had an intense focus on emotions, and the ability to convey those emotions to those he works with and to the audience.”

With his first film in 2001, “Monsters, Inc.,” Mr. Docter set out to answer a question: What if the creatures under your bed were really nice guys? “Up” made tying balloons to a house and floating off into the South American jungle believable. Mr. Docter, who is married with two children, also has writing credits on “Wall-E” and “Toy Story.”

“I guess you may know that he lives in a tree house,” Mr. Catmull said dryly in response to a question about Mr. Docter’s childlike, cynicism-free sensibility.

Mr. Docter, who is 6-foot-5 and drives a tiny Smart car, built a home in 2008 partly on a secluded hillside in Northern California and partly tucked into the branches of an adjoining 60-foot-tall artificial tree; a suspension bridge connects the two. “I had a dream to live in a treehouse when I was a kid, and that dream never quite went away,” he said at the time. (Don’t even think about it: You can’t see anything from the road.)

As a boy growing up in Minnesota, he dreamed of turning his bedroom into the Enchanted Tiki Room , a Disneyland attraction where animatronic birds serenade guests. So he did. “I harvested some bamboo during a summer trip to California, and my parents hauled it across country strapped on the top of the van,” he said. He powered his version with an air compressor bought with his confirmation money.

“I always felt this awkwardness and shyness, and so I kind of retreated into my own little world,” Mr. Docter said. “That’s part of why I gravitated toward animation. It was easier to draw something that expressed how I felt than to say it out loud.”

To understand how “Inside Out” came about, it helps to start with Mr. Docter’s childhood. When he was in the fifth grade, his parents, both teachers, moved the family to Denmark for a year so his father could study the chorale music of Carl Nielsen. While his two younger sisters (both now professional musicians) had an easier time, Mr. Docter felt out of step, a feeling that would last until late high school.

“That was the most difficult time of my life,” he said. “Suddenly, bam, your idyllic boyhood bubble is popped, and you’re aware that everything you do and everything you wear and everything you say is being judged by everyone else.”

Flash forward to late 2009, when Mr. Docter noticed his pre-teenage daughter, Elie, experiencing a similar transition. “She started getting more quiet and reserved, and that, frankly, triggered a lot of my own insecurities and fears,” he said. “And it also made me wonder what was going on. What happens in our heads during these moments?”

Mr. Docter and his “Inside Out” team, including Jonas Rivera, a producer, and Ronnie Del Carmen, a secondary director, started to research how the mind operates. They spent time with the psychologist Paul Ekman , who is renowned for his research on emotions, and Dacher Keltner , a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

So while “Inside Out” may look like a cartoon (the emotions, especially Joy, are stretchy and covered in tiny, effervescent particles, and the film’s bright, retro art design is meant to recall Broadway musicals of the 1950s), the movie aims to make basic scientific sense. For instance, scientists believe that short-term memories are transferred to longer-term space during sleep; when Riley goes to bed, her memories, each one represented by a marble , get processed through a series of chutes and ramps.

But with a dose of reality came responsibility. “We initially considered sending Riley into a deep depression,” Mr. Docter said. “But we realized that was not appropriate.”

The big story problem involved Fear and Sadness. For a long time, Mr. Docter said, the movie had Joy and Fear getting lost together. “It seemed like the funniest choice,” he said.

But as work progressed, the pairing felt wrong. Mr. Docter said he went for a walk one Sunday and began catastrophizing: His firing was imminent. He knew it. (“That’s a feeling we all share from time to time,” Mr. Lasseter said. “It’s so difficult, especially with something original, to put yourself out there and show unfinished work.”)

While on his stroll, Mr. Docter started to think about his friends at Pixar and what he would miss about them. “I love them,” he said. “They make me happy. But these are people I have also been angry at. I’ve gone through sadness with these people, especially when we lost Steve.”

He continued: “At that moment, I realized that Sadness was the key. We were trying to push her to the side. But she needed to be the one going on the journey. Joy needed to understand that it’s O.K. for Sadness to be included at the controls once in a while. It’s only the interaction and complexity of all of these emotions that brings a real connection between people.”

Mr. Docter gave the Pixar brain trust a longer version of his epiphany that summer day in the conference room.

“By the end, John uncrossed his arms and said, ‘Yeah, that’s the right decision,’ ” Mr. Docter said. “And he smiled.”

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Dr Colman Noctor, Child and Adolescent Pyschotherapist at St Patrick's Mental Health Services, takes us through how the use of metaphor in the film Inside Out can help children and young people tackle complex mental health topics.

The central theme of Inside Out is based around a character called "Riley" who is a young girl whose family have to move because her father cannot find work. The unique insight to the plot is that the viewer is introduced to a number of characters inside Riley’s head. Each of these characters represent an emotion like anger, sadness, joy, disgust and anxiety . As the plot unfolds and Riley is struggling to adjust to her new surroundings.

The emotionally representative characters in Riley’s head undergo a crisis where ‘Joy’ and ‘Sadness’ get lost in her long-term memory and must find their way back to the ‘control base’ where the other emotions are located. The storyline is superbly interwoven between Riley and her parents ' experiences of inside and outside their heads. This theme allows the viewer to distinguish between and connect the relationship of inside (intrapersonal) and outside (interpersonal) communication.

Firstly, the fact that this movie is engaging, high quality and entertaining is both unique and helpful, because many of the movies that contain a mental health message can be quite ‘arthouse’ and ‘dark’, and are not suitable to a child audience. I feel that the age group that this movie is especially relevant for would be the tweenagers (10 to 13 years old), but I can see how the powerful metaphor inherent in this movie would appeal to people of all ages.

One of the approaches that can be used to explain quite complex emotional concepts to children is metaphor. This is because something that is described in a ‘once removed’ way is far less threatening and, therefore, more prone to understanding. The use of metaphor in Inside Ou t is fantastic.

Emotionality is something that we all struggle with. More specifically, learning to put language on emotion can be a real challenge. One of the core concepts of any therapy is to facilitate a person to put words or meaning on feelings , which can be a significant challenge. Once we can name a feeling, we can begin to understand it, and when we understand it, we can begin to deal with it.

Culturally, we are moving more and more towards brevity when it comes to language and communication. We are encouraged more and more to limit our words into the neatness of 140 character descriptions, which do not lend themselves to emotionality. Emotionality is often not neat and can be messy, and so it has to be ‘processed’ and elaborated on rather than deduced and minimised. Therefore, it is really refreshing to see a movie that dedicates its complete plot line to processing and understanding emotion.

Not only does this movie demonstrate metaphors of emotion and thought, through the representation of inner characters, it goes on to explore the interaction of emotions with each other, which is often a phenomena that we neglect to consider. The co-existence of more than one emotion at one time can be confusing and can seem like something that we are reluctant or unable to describe, as there is an urge to describe only the dominant emotion. However, anyone who is psychologically aware will realise that, often, emotions exist as multiplicities and the interaction and understanding the ‘cause and effect’ of these emotions on other behaviours can be a central aspect of psychological work.

Intrapersonal and interpersonal communication

The most impressive aspect of Inside Out is the emphasis on intrapersonal communication. We are all familiar with the concept of interpersonal communication, which involves how we interact with each other , but the concept of intrapersonal communication is more concerned with how we relate to, and interact with, ourselves. Most psychological schools of thought will agree that these two concepts are linked. Often, the interpersonal aspect of our communication is founded upon or originates from our intrapersonal processes, and this can be a core concept of understanding the resulting behaviour.

This is illustrated really well in the scene in the movie where Riley gets explosively angry at the family dinner table. This observable interpersonal behaviour (anger) occurs as a result of an intrapersonal process where emotions ( anxiety , sadness , disgust and joy) interact with each other to trigger the resulting behavioural outburst. To the onlooker, it just looks like an outburst that has occurred out of the blue, but, with the insight into the intrapersonal process, we get a sense of the build-up and, therefore, the meaning behind this behaviour.

We are all multidimensional beings who experience emotion, thought and behaviour. We feel, we think and we do. We place an emphasis on behaviour because it is often all we have to go on, in that it is observable, obvious and what we can see. However, the process of emotion and thought that occurs under the surface, behind the scenes or ‘inside’ is where true meaning and understanding can be established.

Inside Out gives us an insight into the workings of intrapersonal processes and illustrates this in a relatable and identifiable way. The characters that represent emotion are universally similar inside each character’s head, yet uniquely different at the same time. This is an accurate representation as we all experience similar emotions, but all of which are unique to us. The commonality of the characters in the movie allows us to have a conversation based on the shared identification for each of us with these characters whilst, at the same time, recognising our own specific uniqueness.

Core concepts of our personalities

In addition to dealing with the concept of intrapersonal communication there is also the subplot of ‘core concepts’ which the story explains. The premise of this plotline is that the foundation of our personalities is built upon core experiences or memories.

These core concepts are illustrated through family experiences , fun (goofing around), sport and friendship , and are represented as islands in Riley’s head. This aligns itself with the philosophy that we are all products of our experiences and aligns itself with an Object Relations school of thought.

Object Relations theorists believe that core experiences form foundational lenses with which we see the world. These foundational experiences have a significant effect on how we see the world. They create internal working models that determine our world view, albeit positive or negative. These foundational experiences can also contribute to our inner resilience that helps us to cope and respond in times of adversity.

The movie highlights the importance of these foundational experiences by illustrating them as island-like features that encourage resolve and strength of character. What the movie also demonstrates is that, as we grow up and develop, these core concepts can be shattered and need to be reconstructed to form a more adult lens that is not fundamentally that different, but has adjusted to developmental maturity.

The illusion of childhood innocence is no longer the blueprint for resilience when we become adolescents . As young adults, we need something different that serves a similar function of fostering resilience. This is especially relevant for the tweenager (nine to 12 years) who is undergoing the process of illusionment as they enter the pseudo-adult world. Up to this age, we can, in some ways, protect children from adverse life events, and emotions can be distracted away from with a new toy or a bag of sweets.

However, as we approach adolescence, our lives become more sophisticated and our emotions less avoidable. Over the plot of the movie, Sadness is largely ignored or managed by keeping her out of things, yet, as the plot unfolds, the other emotions realise that they can no longer do that. In fact, Sadness needs to be engaged with, included and understood in order for her to be integrated into Riley’s experience of life. For too long, we have seen sadness as an unnecessary and avoidable emotion when, in fact, coping with sadness is an imperative aspect to emotional development . The gentle but clear way in which Inside Out manages this phenomenon is admirable and effective.

I also loved the way this movie demonstrates concepts such as long-term memory, dreams and the unconscious. The script writers bravely dealt with these more abstract concepts which can be very difficult to explain to a child in a way that they understand. Yet the metaphor of the unconscious being a place where traumatic and difficult experiences are stored, but maintain ongoing influence and are likely to resurface at any time, is a crucial aspect to the storyline.

What impresses me most about Inside Out is how bravely and successfully it deals with the concept of the mind. The mind is a concept that even psychological professionals sometimes struggle to define or describe. Inside Out moves away from the notion of the self being linked to the brain or neurology, but rather aligns itself with the more complex concept of the mind detailing the complex interactivity of emotion. I believe that Inside Out could be used as an incredibly useful resource to provide a communal meeting place for children, families and professionals to begin a conversation about the core concepts of the self and the mind which have up to now proven difficult.

I hope that families who see this movie leave with a language and a visual reference point to open up a conversation about emotions, thoughts and behaviours with each other. This could allow us to open up a dialogue about intrapersonal communication that has long since been avoided and ignored. This movie could allow us to try to explore the meaning behind behaviour and could potentially be a discourse that could open up new dimensions to our experiences of our intrapersonal communication.

For example, if a teenage boy and his mum see this movie together, they can use the template of Inside Out to articulate intrapersonal processes. If the boy has had an episode of anger in previous days, both he and his mother can use the metaphor of the characters to recall what was going on for him at the time. In turn, his mum could articulate what her intrapersonal process was like during the interaction, thereby increasing both of their degree of understanding of each other and, hopefully, a more meaningful resolution.

I feel this movie breaks ground and creates a discourse that is desperately needed and has not been available to us before. I hope that we can signpost families and professionals to see the value of this movie and get people to engage with the metaphor in this story. This is a unique and far reaching possibility to use the metaphor and discourse in this movie to improve our communication with each other and open up a different type of conversation where both people and adults have a mutual template as a reference point for their emotions.

I also feel that the benefits of engaging with the potential of this movie to improve communication, insight and relationships are huge. I also feel that the benefits of the Inside Out metaphor is not exclusive to children but may also assist adult intrapersonal communication, which will form a template that could move us from rumination into introspection.

Colman Noctor is the author of Cop On: What it is and why your child needs it to thrive and survive in today’s world,  published by Gill and MacMillan.

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‘Inside Out 2’ Goes Full ‘All About Eve’ with Anxiety and Joy

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Pixar director Kelsey Mann pitched “Inside Out 2” (in theaters June 14) as a hostile takeover of Riley’s (Kensington Tallman) emotions during the onslaught of puberty, led by Anxiety (Maya Hawke ) and cohorts Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser).

In fact, Mann found it analogous to “All About Eve,” with Anxiety as the emotional ingenue willing at first to support Joy and learn from her. That is, until she realizes that she needs to supersede her after Joy blows Riley’s first opportunity to make a good first impression on high school hockey star Valentina (Lilimar Hernandez) at summer camp. Rather than having Riley play it cool, as Anxiety suggests, Joy dials up the emotion and embarrasses her.

Soon after, Anxiety takes over Headquarters and explains her plan for “Operation New Riley”: “My job is to protect her from the scary stuff she can’t see. I plan for the future.” Then, she puts Joy and her support team in a jar and banishes them to Riley’s vault of secrets.

The orange Anxiety is like a Seussified Muppet with her stringy carrot top, bulging eyeballs, wide mouth, and skinny body. Mann told IndieWire that her fast-talking entrance pushed the boundaries of what she could do physically, so he requested that she move comically fast. “She could pop over here, over there, and over there,” he said. “And she could drop down from the top of the frame. And they asked how she was going to do that. I didn’t know. We just did it, and she was funny.”

New tech was also required for the different personality poses of Anxiety’s wild-looking hair. “The sim department have always had the ability to change the hair on a character to be messy or a little bit more straight,” Bonifacio added. “On Anxiety, we felt that those changes needed to be tied to her performance so that when she’s normal, it’s this fountain of hair, but then if she gets excited, it can flex and straighten up. And so giving the animators the ability to suggest those timings to the sim department with this new rig, they were able to take that and make it real.”

The challenge with Anxiety was not making her seem like an unlikable villain, such as when she gets rid of Joy and the other emotions. The animators worked hard to make her appealing by making her impulsive and remorseful.

At the same time, Anxiety is also cunning in the way she thinks several steps ahead about all that could possibly go wrong. “This was very much in line with the research provided by the PhD consultants about what is anxiety and how it manifests itself,” Anderson told IndieWire.

Physically, there was plenty to play with, especially twitching, quick head moves, and shaking. Plus Hawke nailed the frantic quality with her vocal performance. “But we quickly realized that if we did that all the time, for every moment she was on screen, the audience would just be completely exhausted after a few minutes,” Anderson added. “So, finding her meant taking her to 11 where it made sense, but also being able to give her a range so that she’s not constantly at that level.”

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Inside Out 2’s female emotions finally get to look weird

Finally a break from Disney’s same-face syndrome

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When director Kelsey Mann took the helm on Pixar’s Inside Out 2 , Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter had one big suggestion for him. Before taking that role, Docter directed many of the studio’s greatest hits , including the original Inside Out .

At an early press preview going behind the scenes on Inside Out 2 , Mann told Polygon that the interior world of Inside Out in Riley’s mind was supposed to be more “cartoony” than the realism-grounded outside world. But Mann said Docter told him that the final product didn’t quite land the way he wanted.

“He said, ‘We thought we were going far with what we could do with the characters inside the mind, in terms of how broadly they moved and were animated,’” Mann recounted. “‘I think we could have gone further. And I kind of regret not dialing that up a little bit. So I highly suggest that you go further.’ I remember talking to the whole animation department pitching the movie, and saying we wanted to do that. I feel like we’ve done a lot of that on the film — I really tried to push it.”

That’s especially true when it comes to the character design. In the original movie, which centers on an 11-year-old girl and the personifications of emotions in her head, Fear and Anger have distinctly cartoony designs. Their exaggerated shapes are meant to evoke the emotions they represent. But the emotions embodied by female characters don’t capture that same feeling. Joy, Sadness, and Disgust look more generic, and apart from their bright, jewel-toned skin and hair, they could easily pass as human characters in another Disney or Pixar movie. (Joy in particular launched a significant discussion about the longtime problem of Disney Princesses all having the same face , and about Pixar following that trend, designing all its female protagonists with round faces and button noses ).

But from the very first trailer , it was clear that Inside Out 2 ’s new emotions would be different. The sequel introduces Anxiety, a Muppet-like emotion character with a huge, stretchy mouth and big, wobbly eyes. She’s joined by Ennui, who is represented as a lazy, drooping line, and Envy, a tiny mushroom-like blob of an emotion. And there’s also Embarrassment, a huge, hulking figure who hides his big face beneath a hoodie. Already, these four emotions (three of them female) break that round-face, button-nose mold.

“That was a conscious decision that we made,” said Mann. He cites production designer Jason Deamer as the one who really brought those character-design discrepancies to his attention. “[Deamer said,] ‘Why can’t the female characters have the same kind of design sense? It’s pushed, it’s fun.’ And we leaned into that.”

“This is animation, not live action!” Deamer told Polygon. “So let’s do what animation [can] do — really push the weirdness.”

After Turning Red and Luca , which both pushed Pixar in a more stylized, cartoony direction, it makes perfect sense that the filmmakers behind Inside Out 2 would feel emboldened to embrace a less conventional look. That’s an industrywide trend that kicked off with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse , though some studios haven’t been as quick to embrace the movement. But movie by movie, Pixar is slowly welcoming the new.

“The studio [is] more open to having different directors with different sensibilities coming into the fore and wanting to pursue a very specific look,” said animation supervisor Dovi Anderson.

“Audiences are now more ready for that kind of animation,” added animation supervisor Evan Bonifacio. “It’s not going to throw them to see stuff moving around in a specific way that feels pushed.”

Inside Out 2 hits theaters on June 14.

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Inside Out 2’s Belief System Is ‘The Emotional Hit The Last Movie Could Not Give’ – Exclusive Image

The majority of Pixar films are not to be watched without tissues. From the furnace farewell in Toy Story 3 , to the ‘Married Life’ sequence in Up , to the ‘Remember Me’ scene in Coco , the studio tends to have one hand placed firmly on your tear-ducts. And that’s not to mention Inside Out , perhaps the most emotionally effective of any Pixar film (and not just because it’s… well, about actual emotions). The ‘death’ of Bing Bong, the first foray through young Riley’s mind, the reconciliation of Joy and Sadness… it’s a non-stop heart-squeezer. And that’s a tough act to follow for this year’s Inside Out 2 , following Riley through puberty as a raft of new emotions – chiefly Anxiety, plus Envy, Embarrassment and Ennui – come into play.

According to incoming writer Dave Holstein, the newly-developed ‘Belief System’ in Riley’s mind isn’t just a cool environment for the sequel to explore – it’s going to be “the emotional hit that this movie could give, that the last movie could not.” Grab your tissues. The existential expanse – as seen in the exclusive image above – is the home to all the things Riley fundamentally believes to be true, explains director Kelsey Mann. “Now that Riley’s a teenager, she’s starting to develop her own set of beliefs,” he tells Empire . “What if we actually hear Riley say her beliefs in her own voice? If you hear her say, ‘I’m kind,’ you can hear [in] the performance how she feels about that. Or, ‘My parents are proud of me.’ On the flip-side, if there’s a belief that’s not so good, you can really hear the emotion of it.”

For Holstein – who first encountered the Belief System as an idea that had worked its way out of the film, and was the person to work it back into the narrative – it was an instant winner. “It was beautiful ,” he says. “It was just gorgeous. And it made me feel something.” It soon became a core element of Inside Out 2 . “Immediately, I was like, ‘There’s something I want to see at the beginning of this movie, and possibly the end of this movie, that tells me what the movie is’,” he recalls. “So it was very inspirational for me.”

The result is set to bring real emotional power in the follow-up to Pete Docter’s landmark original. And Docter himself is “cautiously optimistic” about how well the sequel is faring in its final stages of production. “It’s like Joy and Fear wrestling each other for [the] controls,” he confesses. “Things are just starting to really sparkle. I don’t want to proclaim victory. There’s always the sense of, ‘Am I deluded? Am I the only one who will like this?’ I have no idea.” All you have to do is believe.

Read Empire ’s full Inside Out 2 – speaking to director Kelsey Mann, Pixar boss Pete Docter, writers Dave Holstein and Meg LeFauve, and star Amy Poehler – in the Deadpool & Wolverine issue , on sale Thursday 9 May. Order a copy online here . Inside Out 2 comes to UK cinemas on 14 June.

• Cast & crew

Inside Out 2

Follow Riley, in her teenage years, encountering new emotions. Follow Riley, in her teenage years, encountering new emotions. Follow Riley, in her teenage years, encountering new emotions.

• Kelsey Mann
• Dave Holstein
• Meg LeFauve
• Amy Poehler
• Phyllis Smith
• Lewis Black

• Embarrassment

• Riley Andersen

• Mrs. Andersen

• Mr. Andersen

• Valentina 'Val' Ortiz

• Coach Roberts

• Subconscious Guard Frank

• Subconscious Guard Dave

• Forgetter Bobby

• Forgetter Paula
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia The first trailer received 157 million online views within the first 24 hours, more than any other Disney animated film, surpassing Frozen II (2019) , with 116 million views.

Riley Anderson : [from the trailer] I'M THE WORST!

Mom's Anger : Welp, there's a preview of the next ten years.

• Connections Featured in AniMat's Crazy Cartoon Cast: The D23 Expo 2022 Special (2022)
• When will Inside Out 2 be released? Powered by Alexa
• June 14, 2024 (United States)
• United States
• Instagram - Disney's Announcement
• Instagram - Pixar's Announcement
• Những Mảnh Ghép Cảm Xúc 2
• Walt Disney Feature Animation - 500 S. Buena Vista Street, Burbank, California, USA (Studio)
• Pixar Animation Studios
• Walt Disney Pictures
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 40 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• Dolby Atmos
• 12-Track Digital Sound
• D-Cinema 96kHz Dolby Surround 7.1
• D-Cinema 96kHz 7.1

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