Embrace your emotional moments with Disney Pixar's Inside Out

Over the weekend, I rewatched Disney Pixar's Inside Out and I forgot how much I loved this film. Inside Out follows the story of Riley who is an ll-year-old happy, goofy, and hockey-loving girl from Minnesota. Riley's life turns upside down when her parents decide to move to San Francisco causing her emotions and personality to change; this story touches on five main emotions — joy, anger, sadness, disgust, and fear — and their abilities to help Riley as she experiences life-changing events. 

Inside Out concept art*

In this 2015 animated film, I enjoyed the overall creativity, themes, and relatable emotional journey the audience gets to experience through the perspective of a preteenager. 

As expected, whenever I watch an animated film by Pixar, I am always left feeling inspired. Inside Out is such a creative film as it tackles complicated subject matters like emotional intelligence and the psychology of how the human brain works; these complex topics are represented in a fun way.

In the film, Pixar represents a person's personality by using personality islands; in Riley's world, her personality consists of five islands: goofy, family, honesty, friendship, and hockey. Another example is using the train of thought to represent someone's thought process, ideas, and information, the dream production to illustrate how we develop abstract dreams and the imagination land where the human brain likes to have imaginative thoughts. And lastly, using the headquarters as a control center for her emotions to dictate how she behaves and acts.

Another reason why this film is so successful is that the film touches on important themes like embracing different types of emotions, having mixed feelings, being heard, child development, personal growth, core personality, learning to cope, being open-minded, learning to adapt and be resilient, and many more. 

Inside Out character sketches*

In the film, the story heavily emphasizes the importance of embracing different emotions and that is okay to feel more than one emotion at once (having mixed feelings). This is illustrated when Riley moves to San Francisco and she starts to experience various kinds of feelings other than joy, such as feeling disgusted, getting more frustrated easily when her tryouts for her new hockey team did not go as well as she has hoped, and feeling sad as she is missing her friends in Minnesota. This is such a powerful theme because it reminds us that it is okay to feel sad and angry and that it is important to embrace what we are feeling in the moment. The theme also let us know that it is okay to have bad days since every day is not always perfect — we learn from these moments. Lastly, this story indicates that our emotions are very complex and this is true especially when we continue to grow as human beings; this is shown near the end of the film when there is a new control center with a button called puberty. 

Next, another main theme this film focuses on is our core personalities. In the film, we can see Riley has core memories — like learning how to first skate with her parents — all of these core memories and experiences shape the person we become; in this case, her core memories have created her love for hockey. This is true in real life because the environment and experiences we endure can have a huge impact on our personalities; for example, I was brought up in a toxic environment where I was constantly being judged for the things I say and now that I am older I feel like I am not able to speak my mind freely without the fear of being criticized. 

Joy concept art*

Lastly, another main theme I will touch on is learning how to cope. In the film, the story shows various coping strategies. For example, Riley forces herself to remain happy even though she is not. Other coping strategies the film showcases are talking to our support systems when we are experiencing difficult times, botting up our feelings inside, running away from our problems, turning away from our support systems, finding the positive side of things to forget about our issues, and many more. 

Overall, this was a fun lighthearted film filled with laughter and emotional moments. Also, I loved all the creative aspects this film brought in illustrating complex topics like our emotions. And lastly, I enjoyed the little details that made the film so much more appealing. For example, the use of color-coded orbs which represent a memory (if it was yellow then it would be happy memory) and the motions of the characters align with what the emotion should be — an example is sadness moving very slowly to indicate her character of being sad or joy being very energetic and jumpy to represent the happiness. 

All in all, I definitely recommend this movie!

*photos were taken from Pinterest