Talking About Pixar’s “Inside Out”

“I will not say ‘Do not weep,’ for not all tears are an evil.” —Gandalf

Seriously, there’s a Tolkien quote for everything.

I’m going to talk about Inside Out and, while I’m not going to give away all details of the ending, I’m not going to especially avoid spoilers either, because this isn’t the kind of review critics write for people deciding whether to see a movie. If you want that kind of review, here it is: the movie’s terrific! Go see it. In fact, if you haven’t already, go see it now, before you read on. I’ll wait.

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Everyone back now? Good.

Even if you disregarded my advice and are reading this without having seen the movie yet, you probably know by now what it’s about: Inside Out tells the story of an 11-year-old girl, Riley, whose world is turned upside down when her family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco. She tries to put on a happy face about the move, but slips into depression before finally admitting her real feelings and beginning to get better.

Or, it’s about the “little voices inside your head,” the emotions who govern Riley’s mood from their high-tech headquarters (pun no doubt intended) and whose operation is thrown into chaos when Joy’s misguided attempts to prevent Sadness from having any influence on Riley’s life cause both of them to become lost in the labyrinth of Riley’s long-term memory, along with the “core memories” that form the basis of Riley’s personality. Joy and Sadness have to find their way back to headquarters, and along the way Joy must come to realize that Sadness, far from being the cause of Riley’s depression, is actually the only emotion that can save her from it.

The genius of Inside Out is that it’s both of the above stories at once, and I don’t just mean in the trivial sense that what Riley does is caused by what the emotion characters do at their control panel. Given they’re telling the story from the point of view of the “little voices,” it would have been the easiest thing in the world for Pixar’s writing team to just make Inside Out a complete fantasy that our lives are really controlled by little people in our heads. But they don’t do that. Instead they tie together events inside Riley’s head with those outside, even when the emotions are nowhere near their control panel in headquarters. Doing so, they make the point (without having to break the surface fantasy by saying it outright) that Riley is as much in control of the emotions as they are of her. Or more accurately: they neither control her nor are controlled by her, because actually they are her; parts of Riley, personified on the screen, doing and thinking the things she’s doing and thinking.

It’s true that the movie includes a lot of comedy/adventure moments that only fit with a “there are little people in our heads” fantasy. But those are just trappings of the story. The dramatic— or I should say the emotional— beats of the movie carefully line up with the deeper truth that everything happening actually reflects the psychology of Riley the whole person. In their storytelling, the writers were careful to keep it that way. It’s no coincidence that Riley’s final slide into depression, with the control panel turning black and locking out even the emotions that are still in headquarters, happens at the same moment that Joy despairs of ever getting back where she belongs; and it happens with Joy nowhere near the control panel. Is it because of Joy’s despair that the control panel goes black? Or does the control panel turning black cause Joy’s despair? Both, or neither: they’re the same thing.

In the scene which kicks off the whole story: after the move to San Francisco, Sadness has a sudden urge to start touching old memories, and when she does this they turn sad. All the emotions are surprised: nothing like that’s ever happened before, and when Joy tries to turn the memories happy again, she can’t. Even Sadness has no idea why she suddenly wants to touch the memories, or why they’re suddenly changing color when she does so. The answer is that the impulse comes from Riley’s whole mind, and her situation: all those memories are about Minnesota, and now that’s gone. Of course they’ll take on a sad tinge. As with Joy in her despair later in the movie, Sadness is acting as part of Riley’s mind even when away from the control panel, and even when Sadness herself doesn’t understand what’s going on. The emotions aren’t alien little people controlling Riley; again, they are Riley, and their journey is hers, whether they’re in headquarters or not.

I haven’t mentioned yet the pivotal character of Bing-Bong, Riley’s almost-forgotten imaginary friend that Joy and Sadness meet during their adventure, and who serves as a specially tear-jerking symbol of Riley’s growing up. “She can’t be done with me,” he mourns, after seeing a busy construction crew sweeping away all of Riley’s preschool imagination— he knows that construction crew or not, it’s Riley doing the sweeping. (And in a nice bit of foreshadowing of the lesson Joy/Riley has to learn, it’s Sadness rather than Joy who is able to cheer him up at that point.)

I’m dwelling on this point because I think it’s enormously difficult to pull of this balance, with characters onscreen whose adventure we can follow on its own terms, while also making sure everything lines up perfectly with the simple drama of a little girl trying to come to terms with moving away from the happy home and friends she knew.

For an example of how difficult it is, hop into your TARDIS and head back to the Middle Ages and a narrative poem called The Romance of the Rose. It tells a love story, but in terms of a garden full of characters that represent the emotions and thoughts of a young woman falling in love (the young man she’s having her romance with appears as himself, interacting with the various characters). Like Pixar’s modern entry into the genre, the Romance matches its visible characters and their drama, readable in its own right, to the hidden story of the real woman and her emotional arc. If Medieval French narrative poetry isn’t your cup of tea, CS Lewis wrote a very nice commentary on the poem called The Allegory of Love which covers the story.

The poem was unfinished, and around fifty years after the first composition, another author tried to finish it— and blew it completely. Even with the completed first half setting everything up for him, the second author just couldn’t figure out how to match the allegory to the reality, and his half lapses into the characters standing around delivering monologues about who they are and what they mean.

So it is not easy to achieve what Pixar manages to handle to perfection in Inside Out; and if you think comparing a modern children’s animated movie to Medieval allegorical poetry is a bit high-concept, well there’s no getting around the fact that no matter which way you turn it, Inside Out is an astonishingly high-concept film. Item two on its genius list is that it manages to make that concept accessible even to the youngest viewers— if I may judge by the reactions of the many kids in the theater when I watched it (both times).

I was going to go on and talk about its story structure as a story structure. The Writer’s Path at SMU, where I teach creative writing, uses the Hero’s Journey. It’s a structure that can be misused by lazy writers, but like all of Pixar’s films, Inside Out deploys it beautifully.

But I’ve gone on long enough.

Go see it. And if you’ve seen it, go see it again. This is a movie that rewards multiple viewings to catch all the nuances (not to mention the freeze-frame Easter eggs).