After having seen Inside Out, I would say that my experience was not as expected. Though the movie tugs at the heat-strings, it was not particularly satisfying. Riley went through a lot of changes in this movie, and in a way progressed and matured emotionally in the span of two hours. But I still felt that she had not learned much by the end of the movie. Riley’s personified emotions learned that Sadness can bring back your emotions when you have gone emotionless, but does Riley know that? What would prevent her from becoming emotionless if another major change happens in her life? What was most frustrating was that we hardly heard Riley’s own thoughts and reflections, as they were reflected from the point of view of her personified emotions. I feel the movie could have benefitted by an ‘inner voice’ where we can hear what Riley is thinking throughout the movie, and then see how her way of thinking and decision-making changes from the beginning of the film to the end.
Furthermore, I took issue with Joy (as I feel I was supposed to). She essentially acts as a bully to Sadness and belittles her through majority of the film. Meanwhile, she is revered as the hero by all the other emotions. Perhaps Joy represents our culture of never revealing our sadness to others. Just as Sandness seems friend-less in the film, we consider sadness as an emotion experienced in solitude. Meanwhile, happiness or joy is most often experienced in the company of others. The main example of this is Riley’s memory of the day her teammates surrounded her to cheer her up after a hockey game. We see Riley alone, and the memory is blue, indicating sadness, then when others come in to the picture to cheer her up, she becomes happy. It’s no coincidence that sadness and loneliness go hand in hand. In sharing our true emotion with others, we can deal with and address negative feelings such as Sadness. Perhaps the reason why Joy has a somewhat dislikable character is to show the adult audience how absurd it is to constantly maintain an outward appearance of happiness. We all have a full range of emotion, but by hiding our sadness from others, it cannot be properly addressed.
Another small issue I took with the film is that Riley got a completely new personality (personality islands) over the course of a day. If anything, her personality islands would be in a constant state of renovation, so that at any point, “Silliness Island” is in the process of becoming “A Good Sense of Humor” island, and so-on. Furthermore, the subconscious should have contained many many memories of her parents, as I feel that a lot of who we are at our core is shaped by our experiences as children (just like subconscious fears). In fact, the personality islands and the bridges that lead to them should be made of her memories. The memories do not sit around living out their shelf-life until they get recycled; they are used to change her brain and therefore personality. We are, in most part, who we were and what we have experienced.
An interesting avenue to explore within the world of Inside Out would be the role of touch. Good touch and bad touch seem to have a huge impact on our memory. For example, Riley’s immediate family always interact with her with ‘good touch’ and I think that facilities their feeling of familial love and closeness. Riley would likely react in a very negative way if her parents suddenly stopped with the good-night kisses, but otherwise kept interacting with her in the same way. We were able to experience what Riley was seeing and hearing, but touch is a major sense that cannot be overlooked when it comes to certain memories.
Overall I think is a good movie for children. Not only will it hopefully spark their interest in Neuroscience, but it will help them better understand their own emotions and hopefully shows them the importance of sharing their emotions, both the positive emotions and especially the negative ones.