Throughout the movie Inside Out, five out six of the commonly accepted universal
emotions are personified within the brain of a little girl, Riley. These five emotions are Joy,
Anger, Sadness, Disgust and Fear (the 6th emotion that was left out was Surprise). In Riley’s brain, the emotion that often seems to control her life is Joy. When we get a quick glimpse inside of the brain of Riley’s mother, it appears that Sadness is her main emotion. For Riley’s father, it’s Anger. Until our discussion after the movie, I didn’t think much of this detail- it seemed to me that the directors of the movie were just trying to mix up the characters so they weren’t all the same. However, during our discussion I learned that for a lot of people, there is one emotion that dominates them. The more I thought about this, the more sense it made. There are clearly people who get angry easier and more often than others, as well as people who seem overly cautious or who become disgusted easily. I believe that if I had a control board in my head similar to the one in the movie, Joy would be dominating it. When we discussed the dominant emotions of the parents, another interesting detail came up: as they age, women’s dominant emotion often becomes sadness, and males often become anger. When thinking about this detail while looking
at Riley’s life, the character Sadness definitely inherited a larger role as the movie progressed. While Joy seemed to run most of Riley’s childhood, she and Sadness started running Riley’s adolescent years together. If Disney and Pixar created another Inside Out movie about Riley as an older woman, would we see that her dominant emotion had completely turned to Sadness? Although there were a lot of small details throughout the movie that resonated true to me, I can only hope that this is not one of them. Although it can be easy to lose some of the fun-loving qualities of the childhood years that Joy brought to Riley, I refuse to give her up as my dominant emotion.
