The story of Inside Out follows Riley and her family as they move their hometown in Minnesota to San Francisco. The Disney/Pixar animated movie follows five core emotions, Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and, Sadness. As we follow Riley throughout her move, we become acquainted with each basic emotion and experience the complexities of emotions that Riley feels as a result of her move.
The beginning of the movie is largely dominated with Joy dictating most of the ‘controls’ in Riley’s command center. Joy prided herself on the four core memories that Riley has experienced, each of which was surrounded on a particular theme. These themes were family, trust, friendship, and hockey. These core memories focusing around times when Riley experienced immense joy, were on special display within the control center, which the movie portrayed as something akin to a marble. In the movie, memories were obtained through these marbles coming into the control center with a particular color: yellow denoting happiness, red – anger, green – disgust etc. For much of the movie, Riley’s memories were a single color – all memories were entirely dictated by one emotion. What I most enjoyed about Inside Out was the “long-term storage” area within Riley’s brain along with the commentary of the consolidation or removed of old memories. The movie accurately represented the ways in which memories are held within our brains. There are certain memories, referred to as flashbulb memories, which I found relevant to the movie’s usage of core memories. A flashbulb memory can be thought of a memory that is remembered very vividly or one that has significant emotional significance. Although most flashbulb memories are thought of with respect to negative feelings, it is possible to have positive flashbulb memories. Further, as Joy and Sadness were exploring Riley’s long term storage area, they stumbled across characters whose job was to dispose of memories that had lost their color, which signified that they were no longer memories that Riley had placed salience on. In many respects, this is accurate to our current understanding of the acquisition and holding of certain memories. We tend to hold on to memories with emotional significant or memories that we may need to recall, such as a birthday; whereas less important memories, such as someone’s telephone number, can be a memory for which salience can be easily lost.
As the movie concluded and the difficulties that Riley dealt with as a result of her move, we began to see a more mature Joy and Riley. Joy was able to learn that there is no scale for happiness without sadness and that a more complete individual is one who can appreciate the highs but power through the lows. Inside Out was able to beautifully capture not only the coming of age story or Riley but also the inherent struggles that we all go through in our lives, when we realize that the core memories that Joy had always thought were pure happiness was actually the result of another extreme emotion.