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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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Film credits.

Inside Out (2015)

102 minutes

Amy Poehler as Joy (voice)

Mindy Kaling as Disgust (voice)

Bill Hader as Fear (voice)

Phyllis Smith as Sadness (voice)

Lewis Black as Anger (voice)

Kaitlyn Dias as Riley (voice)

Paris Van Dyke as Meg (voice)

Kyle MacLachlan as Dad (voice)

• Pete Docter
• Michael Giacchino
• Meg LeFauve

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Review: Inside Out

By Michael Sragow in the July-August 2015 Issue

Pixar’s Pete Docter has a genius for spinning imaginative extravaganzas out of mundane materials—kids’ room closet doors in Monsters, Inc. , an old man’s gingerbread house in Up . With Inside Out , he reaches into an 11-year-old girl’s mind and creates a marvelous mental landscape out of visual elements as prosaic as jellybeans and clowns. The movie is both audacious and unpretentious, starting with its heroine, Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias), a Minnesota girl who loves her mom (Diane Lane), dad (Kyle MacLachlan), and ice hockey. She’s a paradigm of American happy-childhood kitsch—or at least that’s how the gal who introduces Riley’s story, Joy (Amy Poehler), desperately wants us to see her.

In a Disney/Pixar first, Joy turns out to be an unreliable narrator who shades reality to fit her temperament. Oh, and one other thing: Joy is not a flesh-and-blood female but the embodiment of an emotion inside Riley’s head. She and four other emotions—Fear (Bill Hader), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Anger (Lewis Black), and Sadness (Phyllis Smith)—govern Riley’s behavior from a Playskool-like control panel in “headquarters.” Or do they? Riley, after all, summons them into being.

Clouds form when Riley’s family moves to a grungy part of San Francisco: the house is dingy, and Dad is distracted by work. But real trouble comes when Riley’s mom says that the women of the house should keep smiling and that Riley should remain her parents’ “happy girl.” In lesser films, that would be a rallying cry. Not here. This breakthrough cartoon attacks enforced happiness and optimism—the white bread and butter of American family movies.

As the action shifts back and forth inside and out of Riley’s head, Docter erects a dizzyingly rich internal architecture. Riley’s memories come in the form of color-coded spheres that roll into headquarters like bowling balls. A few become core memories. Most get sucked into the labyrinth of Long-Term Memory and placed in towering arcades. Nearby, floating Islands of Personality—gimcrack constructions named Hockey and Goofball as well as Family, Honesty, and Friendship—sum up the life of Riley. They crumble when Riley teeters on the brink of losing her identity.

As Joy struggles with Riley’s controls, Inside Out threatens to be a film about emotion rather than a genuinely emotional movie. But Docter generates convulsive comedy and drama. Each emotion has a good and a bad side. Joy, who looks like the daughter of Peter Pan and Tinker Bell, is an inspiration and a master of denial. She insists on keeping Riley happy but also refuses to let her grow up. Anger, a squat red firecracker, energizes but also endangers Riley with his explosive fury at injustice. Disgust, a pouty, emerald mean girl, saves Riley from foul food and faux pas, yet overvalues her fallible taste. Fear, an un-sprung purple coil of a man, protects Riley one moment, paralyzes her the next. Joy undervalues poor blue Sadness as an endomorphic mope—but Sadness is honest and authentic. Without her, Joy learns, happiness no longer makes sense as Riley faces change.

When Joy and Sadness get sucked into Long-Term Memory, the film becomes a thrilling oddball odyssey. At its peak, they survive the minefield of “Abstract Thought.” Have concepts like “nonobjective fragmentation” and “deconstruction” ever been this funny? Have “two-dimensionality” and “nonfigurative representation” ever been so visceral? Viewers will feel catapulted into a phantasmagoric world designed by Bizarro Picasso.

Docter himself resists abstraction: he makes Riley’s inner space equally literal and metaphorical—true to her specific personality. Riley’s fuzzy imaginary friend, Bing Bong (Richard Kind), could have been as annoying as Jar Jar Binks, but instead he becomes the poignant embodiment of a tween girl’s need to give up childish things and embrace Sadness as well as Joy. As an antidote to infantilized mass culture, Inside Out is just what the Docter ordered.

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Cannes Film Review: ‘Inside Out’

Pixar’s most out-there concept fuels the toon studio's most vivid and relatable film yet.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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On paper, “ Inside Out ” sounded like another lunatic gamble: an adventure that takes place entirely within the head of an 11-year-old girl, featuring her Emotions as characters — although if anyone could pull off a logline like that, it would be the team that made us care about rats who cook, toys that bond, and robots who fall in love. Sure enough, in execution, Pixar ’s 15th feature proves to be the greatest idea the toon studio has ever had: a stunningly original concept that will not only delight and entertain the company’s massive worldwide audience, but also promises to forever change the way people think about the way people think, delivering creative fireworks grounded by a wonderfully relatable family story.

Could “Inside Out” be Pixar’s best movie? Frankly, that question is almost beside the point. Objectively speaking, several of the studio’s previous films work better in terms of character appeal or narrative accomplishment (though when it comes to cartoons, playing favorites is inevitably a subjective game). In terms of its ambitious underlying concept, however, “Inside Out” blows the others away, going beyond the screen to become something audiences will carry around for the rest of their days — not as tie-in merchandise or spinoff theme parks (although there will inevitably be plenty of both), but as an elegant and iconic visual metaphor for understanding their own emotions, and empathizing with others’.

“Do you ever look at someone and wonder what is going on inside their head?” asks Joy, a radioactive-yellow gal (voiced by Amy Poehler , at her peppiest) who serves as both narrator and chipper team captain for a group of five Emotions assigned to Headquarters: the place in Riley’s brain where all her thoughts and feelings originate. As the upbeat young heroine’s dominant Emotion, Joy serves alongside blue Sadness (Phyllis Smith), violet Fear (Bill Hader), fiery red Anger (Lewis Black) and green Disgust (Mindy Kaling) to manage memories, generate ideas and otherwise help Riley deal with life’s challenges.

Just when her Emotions think they’ve got everything under control, Riley’s parents decide to move from Minnesota to San Francisco, sending her Emotions into turmoil — because it’s not enough for Pete Docter and co-director Ronnie Del Carmen to introduce such a compelling model for how the brain really works; they’re also expected to craft an interesting story around it. For the first 11 years of Riley’s life, her Emotions have stood crowded around an instruments panel of what looks like an air-traffic control tower inside her head. Amusingly swift glimpses into the minds of other characters suggest everyone is wired more or less the same way, while still allowing for wild variation in the efficiency of the five Emotions they’ve been dealt.

In Riley’s case, she’s young and her Emotions are still hammering out the dynamic between themselves. Like, what’s Sadness’ role exactly? “I’m not actually sure what she does. I’ve checked,” Joy says, hinting at one of the points on the film’s positive-minded agenda: helping young audiences to understand and appreciate what role Sadness plays in their own lives. (If only the film could also teach them that Boredom isn’t necessarily bad, either, but merely the sign of an inactive mind.)

Incoming memories are stored in bright glowing orbs, color-coded according to whatever Emotion was dominant at the time she experienced it, then stored in the appropriate place in the vast landscape of her mind. (Oddly, while Riley’s memories play like little movies, projected inside her head but seen from an objective outside view, her dreams are made at a movie studio with a subjective p.o.v. camera.) Riley’s brain might as well be another planet — unusually dangerous, all things considered, with different islands for each of her key qualities. It’s full of amusing nooks and crannies, like Imagination Land and the more sinister Subconscious, which this fantastic voyage takes time to visit along the way, giving composer Michael Giacchino the chance to augment his heartening score with separate mood-appropriate themes for each of these realms.

Too often, movies that introduce wildly fantastical parallel worlds never find time to explore them — the way Dorothy only visits one corner of Oz in the 1939 film, or how “Wreck-It Ralph” only taps into a few of its potential gaming universes. Docter and Del Carmen make it a point to poke around here, and though the film absolutely could have been denser, they’ve opted for just the right balance of context and story, lest spending too much time with the Emotions deprive auds of experiencing the actual emotions that come from connecting with Riley and her family.

For that reason, although “Inside Out” takes place almost entirely in Riley’s head, every so often, the film surfaces to check in on how she’s doing in real life, as if taking a deep breath of relatability before plunging back into her more abstract interior world, since it otherwise might been all too easy for the film to get “lost in thought.” We see Riley as an infant, at several stages in her childhood and again at 11 (Kaitlyn Dias), trying to cope with the disappointment of San Francisco, where the family’s house is a dump, new friends are hard to find and playing hockey isn’t the same as it was in Minnesota.

Though her parents (Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan) express concern, it’s up to Riley — and by extension, the five Emotions struggling to operate her mental command center — to keep her happy amid all these changes. But something’s off: Blame it on the cross-country move or the approach of puberty, but the Emotions don’t seem to work as they always have before. Most alarming, Sadness is tired of being excluded, but every time she touches something, it turns blue … and so does Riley.

Joy — who superficially resembles Disney’s favorite fairy, Tinkerbell, minus the wings — means well, but she’s a bit of a control freak, and in trying to protect Riley’s “core memories,” she accidentally ejects herself and Sadness from Headquarters. It’s a long way back, as the brain terrain crumbles around them, and in the interim, Riley’s mental state begins to unravel with Fear, Anger and Disgust left in control, unwisely deciding that the best idea is for Riley to run away. Given the sheer complexity of concept, it was wise for Docter and his team to keep the story simple, although one can’t help but wonder how an edgier emotional challenge — such as divorce, death or an unthinkably risky “trans-parent” situation — might have given Riley’s character so much more to deal with.

While Riley and her world look consistent with Pixar’s other human creations, dating all the way back to “Toy Story,” everything to do with her Emotions demanded a unique visual solution. Docter and Del Carmen seem to have reached into Disney’s past for inspiration, seizing on the 1950s-era style seen in shorts like “Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom” (plump, bespectacled Sadness looks just like that Oscar winner’s Professor Owl host), as well as then-rival UPA’s more abstract cartoon aesthetic (Fear resembles Gerald McBoing-Boing’s dad, while a crazy shortcut to Imagination Land embraces such deconstructionism outright).

In addition to linking the project to a period when advances in color film processes and stereoscopic 3D sparked wild visual experimentation in cinema, “Inside Out’s” retro look fits well with Pixar’s cutting-edge technology, blending vintage style choices with lighting and texture options previously unavailable to animators. Even something as seemingly basic as the Emotions’ skin texture — more of a pulsing mass of glowing electron-like particles, really — reflects unexpected solutions to infinite questions Docter’s gonzo idea must have raised. In other cases, it’s the streamlining of ideas that serves the material so well: from the vivid colors to the way the story always comes back to parent-child relations, playing equally well to both demographics.

As choices go, the voice casting couldn’t be better for all five of the Emotions. Smith’s Eeyore-like Sadness serves as the perfect foil to Poehler’s ebullient Joy, while Anger’s surprisingly cute appearance and diminutive stature make Black’s scenery-chewing performance that much funnier. Hader plays Fear as a nervous jitterbug, while Kaling’s disaffected Valley-girl delivery keeps Disgust (who has the least to do) feeling like an integral part of the team.

While the initial idea was directly suggested by Disney’s 1943 “Reason and Emotion” short — a wartime one-reeler that characterized the eponymous disciplines forever dueling for control — the Pixar team has rethought the model, giving it the most intuitive and indelible form, with the result that viewers can’t help but imagine a similar dynamic operating in their own heads. To borrow a notion from Malcolm Gladwell, the pic’s “stickiness factor” is through the roof, making it one of those rare movies that transcends the medium, the way Melies visualized a moon landing or Romero invented zombies.

Concepts like this come around maybe once a decade, but linger for centuries, and even if others (like early-’90s TV show “Herman’s Head”) got there first, you’ve gotta hand it to Pixar for making it endure. At the risk of hyperbole, people will still be thinking in terms of these anthropomorphized Emotions long after movies as we know them are gone, in the distant future, when screens are obsolete and immersive stories are beamed directly into your frontal lobe. There’s a reason they call Pixar’s inner team the “Brain Trust”: They can be counted on not only to imagine, but to execute such original ideas as these.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (noncompeting), May 18, 2015. MPAA Rating: PG. Running time: 95 MIN.

• Production: (Animated) A Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures release of a Disney presentation of a Pixar Animation Studios production. Produced by Jonas Rivera. Executive producers, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton.
• Crew: Directed by Pete Docter. Co-director, Ronnie Del Carmen. Screenplay, Docter, Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley; story, Docter, Del Carmen. Camera (color, 3D), Patrick Lin; editor, Kevin Nolting; music, Michael Giacchino; music supervisor, Tom MacDougall; production designer, Ralph Eggleston; sound designer (Dolby Atmos, Datasat), Ren Klyce; supervising sound editor, Shannon Mills; re-recording mixers, Michael Semanick, Tom Johnson; supervising technical director, Michael Fong; supervising animators, Shawn Krause, Victor Navone; character supervisor, Sajan Skaria; effects supervisor, Gary Bruins; stereoscopic supervisor, Bob Whitehill; associate producer, Mark Nielsen; casting, Kevin Reher, Natalie Lyon.
• With: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Richard Kind, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, Kaitlyn Dias, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan.

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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: 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 Review

23 Jul 2015

104 minutes

Pixar is the owner of cinema’s most famous brain trust, a group of wildly different personalities who come together to shape adolescent (and grown-up) hearts and minds through the power of storytelling. It is perhaps surprising, then, that they have taken so long to make Inside Out , a film about a literal brain trust, this one controlling the heart and mind of a kid on the brink of adolescence. What Pete Docter, the driving force behind Monsters, Inc. and Up , and co-director Ronnie del Carmen have done is make a film about what it feels like to be 11 years old, with all the shifting sensations and certainties that entails, through the prism of duelling emotions embodied in lovable cartoon forms. If the idea of dramatising inner lives in animation has precedents, few films have explored the concept with the wit, brio and profound pathos Docter, del Carmen and co. conjure up.

To be sure, Inside Out has trace elements of previous Pixar flicks. It has the mismatched pairings, a support team working to ensure a child’s happiness, the fascination with working practices, and a journey to get home that have figured in the studio’s work for years. But there is freshness here. Inside Out features passages that offer untethered flights of imagination, full of bravura, wit, surealism and invention that touch base with everything from Hieronymus Bosch to Tex Avery. At times it makes Yellow Submarine look like Coronation Street.

The exterior story is a simple one: tomboyish 11-year-old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) is uprooted from her idyllic hockey-playing life in rural Minnesota after her dad lands a demanding job in downtown San Francisco. But it’s Riley’s inner space that is buzzing. Yellow manic pixie dream girl Joy (a buoyant Amy Poehler) has ruled the roost, keeping the other emotions, Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling) in check. But with all the change (the move, puberty), Sadness is on the rise.

What’s great here is the simple, lucid logic the screenplay imbues into the set-up. The Emotions dictate Riley’s feelings in a shiny space-age HQ dominated by an enormous control panel — Pixar is enamoured with such consoles: Lifted built a whole short film around one — and festooned with tubes and shelves where memories are moved and stored as gold orbs. The pillars that Riley’s life is built on, such as friendship, hockey and family, are represented as floating islands like the areas in a theme park. It’s one of Docter and del Carmen’s magic tricks that they let us luxuriate and play in this world without letting the pace and urgency of the storytelling flag.

The inciting incident that sees these pillars begin to crumble is a crisis during Riley’s first day at a new school, ejecting Sadness and Joy from HQ into the darkest recesses of Riley’s mind. Here the movie becomes an odd-couple road trip as the pair travel through Long Term Memory, Abstract Thought (here Joy and Sadness are pulled into different iterations of modern art) and Dream Production (realised as an old-school Hollywood studio system), hooking up with Riley’s long-forgotten, elephant-like imaginary friend, Bing Bong (Richard Kind). As they try to make their way back to base, the wit and imagination on show here is simply staggering.

Yet Docter and del Carmen don’t get lost in their fantasy creations. They always keep front and centre the impact of the travails of Joy and Sadness on Riley’s life, making sure it doesn’t become too abstract to be unrelatable. The most affecting human in a Pixar film since Up’s Carl Fredricksen, Riley is a likable pre-teen, trying her best to be strong for her busy-at-work dad while struggling to juggle the newness that has just entered her life. To underline the point, the two worlds are visually poles apart. Inside Riley’s head is an explosion of colour, a riot of vibrancy. Outside Riley’s world, San Francisco is colourless and dull, muted by a permanent Bay-area fog.

It might be a film that will happily exist as a fast food tie-in or an amusement park spin-off but there is underplayed profundity and ambition here. Ultimately it’s a film that dares to dramatise human nature, respecting the complex play of burgeoning emotions and illustrating the role sadness plays in turning children into adolescents. It’s as poignant a portrayal of the loss of innocence as we’ve seen all year.

The arguments will rage over whether Inside Out represents the absolute pinnacle of Pixar. Some ( Toy Story ) debatably have richer characters. Others ( Up ) may have deeper reservoirs of feeling. But if you cherish the studio for coming up with bold, original, funny, emotionally resonant ideas executed beautifully, then Inside Out delivers in spades. Perhaps we should be grateful that Pixar came up with the idea at all: if it were Michael Haneke we might have been in for a toon about Self-Loathing, Ennui, Angst, Gloom And Dejection fighting for control of a dying Austrian grandmother. Innen Nach Außen, anyone?

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Gray Matter

The Science of ‘Inside Out’

By Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman

• July 3, 2015

FIVE years ago, the writer and director Pete Docter of Pixar reached out to us to talk over an idea for a film, one that would portray how emotions work inside a person’s head and at the same time shape a person’s outer life with other people. He wanted to do this all in the mind of an 11-year-old girl as she navigated a few difficult days in her life.

As scientists who have studied emotion for decades, we were delighted to be asked. We ended up serving as scientific consultants for the movie, “Inside Out,” which was recently released.

Our conversations with Mr. Docter and his team were generally about the science related to questions at the heart of the film: How do emotions govern the stream of consciousness? How do emotions color our memories of the past? What is the emotional life of an 11-year-old girl like? (Studies find that the experience of positive emotions begins to drop precipitously in frequency and intensity at that age.)

“Inside Out” is about how five emotions — personified as the characters Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness and Joy — grapple for control of the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley during the tumult of a move from Minnesota to San Francisco. (One of us suggested that the film include the full array of emotions now studied in science, but Mr. Docter rejected this idea for the simple reason that the story could handle only five or six characters.)

Riley’s personality is principally defined by Joy, and this is fitting with what we know scientifically. Studies find that our identities are defined by specific emotions, which shape how we perceive the world, how we express ourselves and the responses we evoke in others.

But the real star of the film is Sadness, for “Inside Out” is a film about loss and what people gain when guided by feelings of sadness. Riley loses friends and her home in her move from Minnesota. Even more poignantly, she has entered the preteen years, which entails a loss of childhood.

We do have some quibbles with the portrayal of sadness in “Inside Out.” Sadness is seen as a drag, a sluggish character that Joy literally has to drag around through Riley’s mind. In fact, studies find that sadness is associated with elevated physiological arousal, activating the body to respond to loss. And in the film, Sadness is frumpy and off-putting. More often in real life, one person’s sadness pulls other people in to comfort and help.

Those quibbles aside, however, the movie’s portrayal of sadness successfully dramatizes two central insights from the science of emotion.

First, emotions organize — rather than disrupt — rational thinking. Traditionally, in the history of Western thought, the prevailing view has been that emotions are enemies of rationality and disruptive of cooperative social relations.

But the truth is that emotions guide our perceptions of the world, our memories of the past and even our moral judgments of right and wrong, most typically in ways that enable effective responses to the current situation. For example, studies find that when we are angry we are acutely attuned to what is unfair, which helps animate actions that remedy injustice.

We see this in “Inside Out.” Sadness gradually takes control of Riley’s thought processes about the changes she is going through. This is most evident when Sadness adds blue hues to the images of Riley’s memories of her life in Minnesota. Scientific studies find that our current emotions shape what we remember of the past. This is a vital function of Sadness in the film: It guides Riley to recognize the changes she is going through and what she has lost, which sets the stage for her to develop new facets of her identity.

Second, emotions organize — rather than disrupt — our social lives. Studies have found, for example, that emotions structure (not just color) such disparate social interactions as attachment between parents and children, sibling conflicts, flirtations between young courters and negotiations between rivals.

Other studies find that it is anger (more so than a sense of political identity) that moves social collectives to protest and remedy injustice. Research that one of us has conducted has found that expressions of embarrassment trigger others to forgive when we’ve acted in ways that momentarily violate social norms.

This insight, too, is dramatized in the movie. You might be inclined to think of sadness as a state defined by inaction and passivity — the absence of any purposeful action. But in “Inside Out,” as in real life, sadness prompts people to unite in response to loss. We see this first in an angry outburst at the dinner table that causes Riley to storm upstairs to lie alone in a dark room, leaving her dad to wonder what to do.

And toward the end of the film, it is Sadness that leads Riley to reunite with her parents, involving forms of touch and emotional sounds called “vocal bursts” — which one of us has studied in the lab — that convey the profound delights of reunion.

“Inside Out” offers a new approach to sadness. Its central insight: Embrace sadness, let it unfold, engage patiently with a preteen’s emotional struggles. Sadness will clarify what has been lost (childhood) and move the family toward what is to be gained: the foundations of new identities, for children and parents alike.

Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Paul Ekman is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco.

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Movie Review: Inside Out

The movie Inside Out is about an 11-year old girl Riley, who faces the first difficult situation of her life when her parents decide to move from Minnesota to California. The moviemakers have tried to show in an interesting manner the feelings she has throughout the whole experience. The five feelings, in fact, are animated characters: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust. At a particular moment, one of these five characters take hold of the young girl's mind and she starts engaging in certain behaviors resulting from that feeling. While watching the movie, we realized it relates to the lectures on Conflict, especially Intrapersonal Conflict in several ways. Most prominent is the intrapersonal conflict she faces when her expectations of life (or Shoulds, as Karen Horney would put it) meet with the reality of life. First time this happens when the Anderson family reaches their new home in San Francisco and it does not look anything like the ones expected by Riley. The journey itself is not the most pleasant experience of Riley's life, and when Disgust sarcastically remarks "Why don't we live in the smelly car, we have already been inside it for like forever", Joy is quick at pointing out "Which is actually good since it gave us time to think about how our new house is going to look like". This practice of fantasizing about the future house in itself might not be the most productive one, but the point was to distract Riley from focusing on the negative. This somehow resonates with the idea that we discussed in class while talking about the ABC model, that if you are stuck and know that you cannot get out of it for a while, instead of crying over it, accept it and use that time to do something productive instead. Joy seems to have understood Aaron Beck's idea that the degree to which one gets dissatisfied from a situation depends upon how one processes the thoughts and beliefs about that situation, and hence always tries to find the silver lining. It is interesting how throughout the movie, Joy keeps focusing on the positive in each situation no matter how miserable it appears to be. In Joy's own words, "You can't always focus on what's going wrong. There is always a way to turn things around, to find the fun." Joy also appears to be aware of the idea that we cannot change the world events (or situations that we do not have control over), but we can always change the way we think about them. When Riley enters her new room and Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust start recording their respective memories, Joy proposes the prospect of thinking about how to decorate the room. Similarly, when afterwards Riley learns that the moving van (which had all her stuff) was not going to be arriving any time soon, Joy introduces the idea of spending time playing hockey with a crumbled paper instead of worrying. These actions do not change the facts, but they certainly induce a positive emotion in Riley's mind. Hence, these activities can be seen as direct mood enhancing behaviors which really helped. From the prism of CBT, in effect, Riley's expectations (shoulds) of new house when clashed with the reality, created intrapersonal conflict for her. When she first enters the house, antecedent (new house) hit with belief (

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Sociological Concepts in the “Inside Out” Film Essay

Film summary.

Riley, the central character of the film, is the cheerful and inquisitive 11-year-old schoolgirl. She lives with her parents in a small provincial town, where everyone knows each other. For several years, Riley has been communicating with the same friends and going to the same school. She does not suspect that all her relationships, thoughts, and feelings are controlled by five basic emotions: Joy, Fear, Anger, Sadness, and Disgust (“Inside Out – Official US Trailer” 00:01:01-00:01:25). These emotions live in the girl’s mind, and help her cope with problems, guiding her actions every day. Riley and her parents move to the crowded San Francisco from the small town in Minnesota. Suddenly, Sadness and Joy turn out to be in the storage of memory, and the girl falls into depression.

They are looking for a way out of the labyrinths of the long-term memory archives. There, these two emotions meet Bing Bong, the pink elephant, and Riley’s imaginary friend. Understanding the urgency of the situation, he tries to help and lead them on the way to Headquarters. However, the path is not easy and straight: buildings turn into abstract forms, and several stations are passed. The situation is complicated because the long-term memory is demolished to some extent so that Joy cannot rejoice, Riley, while Sadness helps with her grief. Only after Joy and Sadness understand the significance of the collaborative actions, do they cope with difficulties and find the way back to Headquarters. This prevents Riley from the escape and makes her talk with parents about the fact that she misses her old life.

Concept Application

The conflict of this film occurs based on the necessity of the social integration that implies the adoption of an individual by other members of the group. In Riley’s case, she was threatened by the idea of losing the achieved status in a new city. The situation is complicated because she has strong gemeinschaft that is expressed in close relationships with the family and the community (Vaughan and Hogg 400). When Riley feels that parents cannot understand her concerns, her behavior tends to backstage . This means that the girl starts to act as no audience is present so that nobody sees her. At this point, each of the emotions believes that she or he knows best what to do in a difficult situation, and the girl has complete confusion. To build a life in a big city, get used to a new school, and make friends with classmates, Riley’s emotions have to learn how to work together and use groupthink .

When Joy and Sadness, along with an armful of Key Memories, accidentally fly into the pipe, Riley falls into depression. Her core values , based on her character, begin to fall apart after the first serious conflict. In Riley’s life, the main place is occupied by Joy, and when she is temporarily unable to make decisions, the girl’s personality becomes at risk of the collapse. The concept of looking-glass self may be applied here (Vaughan and Hogg, 106). Riley believes that Joy identifies her personality as people like when she is happy, and she becomes joyful as people around her view her in this manner. However, the short-term absence of Joy shows that other emotions are also quite important. For example, emotions understand that the successful game of hockey may benefit from Anger that acts as an excellent stimulant, and there is no need for Joy.

In response to loss and parting, the main heroine reacts with anger and rejection. It would be good to connect this situation to Sadness and cry, but the latter disappears as well as Joy. The world fades and turns into one great evil, in which there is no chance to create new contacts. The so-called destruction mechanism erases all the good from memory, including the ability to love and enjoy. While in the arsenal of a person, there is only Joy, his or her strength is not enough to cope with difficulties as the ability to withstand depressive feelings, loss, and parting is formed with the help of Sadness. The awareness of grief helps to understand and handle difficult situations and problems. Sadness makes a person stronger and wiser, expanding the possibilities of new relationships and recovering the existing ones. Thus, pluralism turns out to be effective and leading as it focuses on multiple emotions.

It is possible to note that the film focuses on a non-material culture that consists of mores , norms , and values . The mentioned elements interact with each other to initiate social change or establish stability in terms of the exchange theory (Vaughan and Hogg 502). Moreover, the fact that Riley puts sanctions that refer to restrictions, criticism, and ridicule regarding social norms proves that the attempt to lock emotions and squeeze out a smile leads to the breakdown. Riley loses her ability to be sad and happy, depending on the situation and instead of acquiring fear, irritation, and disgust for everything.

Five characters-emotions observe the islands that compose the personality structure of Riley: Friendship, Family, Honesty, Hockey that can be interpreted as self-confidence, because the girl is rather interested in this game and wins prizes, and Mischief. Riley’s balance is threatened: if the islands shine with lights at the beginning of the film, they are gradually covered with cracks and are about to collapse at all. While Riley prepares to do the thoughtless things that school girls do in desperation, as the stereotype states, her two main emotions are struggling to return to her from the most terrible place in the world – the Subconscious. Returning to Headquarters, Joy and Sadness restore the personality structure through the deep memories, resulting in Riley, who tried to escape, comes back, has an open dialogue with her nuclear family , and makes her life balanced and happy.

This history of emotions is not just a colorful setting of the visually original world, but also the mechanism of perception of the world, the formation of memories, and the changes in their emotional state. According to the containment theory , the behavior is shaped by what an individual wants rather than by the outside factors. The weaker the containment, the higher the risk of deviance , violating social norms. Riley’s first reaction to the difficult situation was to escape from problems that created depression primarily caused by her behavior and perception. The film shows how people forget the events from childhood, how they confuse the facts and the situation in which all their feelings turn off plunged into shock and apathy. All this is surprisingly simple and understandable in the movie.

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IvyPanda. (2020, September 24). Sociological Concepts in the "Inside Out" Film. https://ivypanda.com/essays/sociological-concepts-in-the-inside-out-film/

"Sociological Concepts in the "Inside Out" Film." IvyPanda , 24 Sept. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/sociological-concepts-in-the-inside-out-film/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Sociological Concepts in the "Inside Out" Film'. 24 September.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Sociological Concepts in the "Inside Out" Film." September 24, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/sociological-concepts-in-the-inside-out-film/.

1. IvyPanda . "Sociological Concepts in the "Inside Out" Film." September 24, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/sociological-concepts-in-the-inside-out-film/.

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IvyPanda . "Sociological Concepts in the "Inside Out" Film." September 24, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/sociological-concepts-in-the-inside-out-film/.

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Inside Out Review

Updated 29 August 2022

Subject Movies

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Category Entertainment

Topic Inside Out

Inside Out is a 2015 American computer animated film directed by Pete Docter. The movie stars Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Richard Kind, Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, and more. It explores a child's struggles to adapt to his new environment. In addition to being a fun movie for kids, Inside Out teaches about the full spectrum of emotions.Inside Out is a Pixar film In Inside Out, the five major emotions are personified by a preteen girl. This is an incredibly touching film, which explores how feelings affect a person, and is a great example of the blending of emotions in Pixar films. The characters in this film are believable and realistic, and the chemistry between Amy Poehler and Bill Hader is exceptional. As the movie moves forward, the audience will be able to identify with Riley, her family, and her friends.It portrays a child's struggle to cope with a new environment The film Inside Out is a moving and witty portrayal of a child's struggles to adjust to a new environment. Its portrayal of the emotions and the way a child copes with these feelings is both realistic and enlightening. This touching and insightful film has content for both children and adults. It never gets corny or complex, and its themes are universal enough to appeal to any audience.It explores the full spectrum of emotions Inside Out explores the full spectrum of emotions. The film is based on the research of psychologist Paul Ekman, who explains that humans experience all types of emotions, from anger to sadness, and how each can be experienced in different ways. The film is a fun ride through the human experience, but it can also be a challenging one. In Inside Out, we meet the lovable Joy, who teeters on the edge of gratingness. It's interesting to watch the gratification of Joy, but it's also a commentary on the unhelpfulness of happiness.It uses metaphors Inside Out is a great movie for children to learn about the importance of metaphor. The metaphor of the mind is a powerful tool to help kids understand the importance of mental health. In the movie, Joy and Sadness explore Riley's subconscious mind and descend into a dark cave like abyss. The metaphor of the mind is a great tool to teach children how the mind works and how our actions affect our emotions.It is a Pixar film Inside Out is a Pixar film that takes viewers on a wild ride of emotion and wacky humor. This animation studio's style is groundbreaking, and its stories are powerful and poignant, with a balance of childlike wonder and wry sarcasm. Inside Out is Pixar's first film since "Monsters University" in 2013, and it surpasses its predecessor in terms of technical achievement and emotional pull.It stars Amy Poehler "Inside Out" is a computer animated film directed by Pete Docter and written by Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley. Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, and Mindy Kaling star in the movie. To learn more about the movie, read on. It will be released on June 17, 2015.It is set in a classroom When watching a movie like Inside Out, keep in mind the different worlds the characters inhabit. These worlds are often different from each other, so you can use the images from the movie to educate your students. For example, if you have a classroom, you can use the images to explain the layout and characters of that classroom. You can also use the images to discuss different emotions. Once you've explained the two worlds, ask your students what they felt.It depicts emotions as marbles The movie Inside Out illustrates emotions as marbles, each with its own personality. The movie is based on the work of psychologist Robert Plutchik, who proposed that there are eight basic human emotions. These emotions can be organized on a wheel of opposites and can be characterized as happiness, sadness, fear, anger, anticipation, and surprise. Each marble represents an emotion, and the movie shows how each of those marbles react to the same situation.It has a diverse cast Inside Out is a 2015 computer-animated film that stars a diverse cast of voices. Amy Poehler plays Joy, while Bill Hader voices Fear. Mindy Kaling portrays Disgust. Amy Poehler is an Emmy Award-winning actress. Lewis Black is an American actor who is also an Emmy Award-winner. Mindy Kaling is an Indian American who co-stars in the popular show The Mindy Project.

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Inside Out Movie Review Essay

Show More I decided to take a different approach to my critical film review. “Inside Out” is a recently new film that does not actually have an identified therapist or client. However, the main themes of the movie have many parallels to the content that we have been learning in class. “Inside Out” is a Disney Pixar movie that brings to life the five emotions (Joy, Anger, Disgust, Fear, and Sadness) of 11-year-old Riley. Life is seemingly going smoothly for Riley and her emotions. She is excelling in hockey, has a best friend, and is creating “core memories” which generate her personality “islands”. Everything runs amuck when Riley and her family move to California and Joy (Riley’s main emotion) and Sadness get trapped outside of the main control center …show more content… Sadness has often been pushed to the side because Joy can’t really find a purpose for her. Through a series of adventures throughout Riley’s conscious and subconscious Joy discovers that Sadness is essential so that Riley can feel Joy. At the end of the movie, Joy and Sadness make it back to the control center and Riley can once again feel her entire range of emotion. As a psychology major, this film really intrigued me. I was a generally happy child like most, but I was also fortunate enough to have parents that taught me that it is ok to cry, get angry, be envious, fear things – so long as I had a balance. On the contrary, I know that there are children who do not realize this. Immediately after watching this movie, I thought about what a great educational tool this movie could be for children. If this film were to be used in a therapy session as a tool I think the therapist would most likely be practicing Cognitive-Behavior Therapy (CBT). CBT emphasizes the role of thinking about the link between how we feel and what we do. Just like Disney identified …show more content… A psychologist named Paul Eckman did a study of universal emotions and found that there is a set of six emotions that are recognized by humans regardless of region, culture, or age. As humans, we express and recognize these emotions (happiness, anger, fear, envy, sadness, and surprise) the same way. “Inside Out” covers five of these six emotions. These emotions let us know when to be empathetic, excited, and even laugh. Thinking back to the humanism perspective and one of the basic assumptions being that humans are born trusting other humans, the movie captures this perfectly by also showing the emotions of Riley’s parents as well. Riley can trust that her mom or dad is feeling sadness because they have an actual physical expression that tells Riley they are sad. That is why I think this movie also aligns well with Gestalt psychology. Gestalt psychology stresses living as a congruent being and living in the here and now. The movie’s message about the importance of emotional congruence for optimal mental health captured what Gestalt psychology is about. I think about when Riley first moves to California and her mom tells her “keep the smile on for dad”. Although Riley is not enjoying her new town and the move, Joy encourages the other emotions to remain positive – even putting Sadness in the corner in a little circle instructing her not to touch anything. Almost mirror to this, in the “Gloria” video, when Dr. Perlz was

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Celluloid Underground review – love letter to a lifelong passion for film and illicit treasure trove

Iranian critic Ehsan Khoshbakht’s personal essay about a man’s smizdat film print collection shows the lengths cinephiles will go to to protect the art form

T he passion of cinephilia is the subject of this absorbing personal essay movie from Iranian critic and film historian Ehsan Khoshbakht, now co-director of the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy, who narrates the film in a style that reminded me a little of Mark Cousins and also perhaps Werner Herzog.

Khoshbakht grew up in post-revolutionary Iran where he developed a love of movies and of moving images generally, even the sternly meagre output on national TV. I laughed out loud at Khoshbakht’s entranced description of the TV’s humble colour test card: “As exciting as an MGM musical!” Khoshbakht (daringly) started a film club as a teenager, digitally projecting foreign movies videotaped from TV. He got into serious trouble for showing the Iranian classic The Cow by director Dariush Mehrjui, an anti-government protestor who was murdered last year (and sadly not included in the Oscars in memoriam section).

But even more importantly, Khoshbakht got to know an extraordinary man called Ahmad Jorghanian, a dedicated rescuer of 35mm films and posters whom this film honours as the “Iranian Henri Langlois”; that is, Iran’s unofficial equivalent of the celebrated French archivist and preservationist, hero of the 60s French New Wave . But unlike Jorghanian, Langlois was never arrested and tortured for his westernised film collection.

Jorghanian spent decades hoarding cans of film in his chaotic apartment and in cramped basements and hiding places all over Tehran, buying them from the warehouses and junk shops into which they had been dumped after being confiscated. Khoshbakht was able to project at least some of this illicit treasure trove on a samizdat basis, using borrowed projection facilities, and is ecstatic seeing these movies come to life once more.

In exile in London, Khoshbakht hears about the death of his old friend, and ponders the fate of Jorghanian’s collection: is film, like our own vulnerable human bodies, liable to decay into dusty nothingness? Historians will still protect what material they can, and protect the cinephilic language and culture that allows these films to be appreciated.

• Documentary films
• Middle East and north Africa
• Film criticism

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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
• See 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

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• Dolby Digital
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• 12-Track Digital Sound
• D-Cinema 96kHz Dolby Surround 7.1
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