What is the main message of Inside Out?

Inside Out revolves around the life of an 11-year old girl named Riley, who is moving across the country with her family. At such an impressionable age, a move is a huge transition, and she experiences an outpour of emotions as she leaves her home, friends, and hockey league behind. Enter the main characters, Riley’s feelings: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust, who provide a glimpse into the workings of Riley’s mind as she navigates this life-changing experience.

Table of Contents Show

Five ways Inside Out taught us about the importance of emotions:
1. All of our emotions exist for a purpose
2. To have emotions is to have a compass
3. Our realities and memories are filtered through our emotional lens
4. Having the language to talk about emotions is empowering
5. Feeling our emotions is a universal human experience

From the moment it started, I couldn’t contain my excitement. The nerd in me was blown away by the extraordinary way in which many of the movie’s messages “measured up” to reality from a neuro-scientific perspective. For example, the way a day full of short-term/working memories is then consolidated during sleep.

While the film gave up some scientific integrity for the sake of storytelling, its poetic license didn’t drive too far away from the reality that we are, essentially, made up of personality traits that wax and wane during different points in our life.

Beyond the intricate science of it all, what Inside Out did do so well was to provide the empowering message that we should learn how to understand, connect to, and accept our feelings and memories in a way that is conducive to thriving.

Five ways Inside Out taught us about the importance of emotions:

1. All of our emotions exist for a purpose

Emotions are neither inherently good or bad, and to think of them in such dichotomous terms is to do yourself a disservice. Every emotion tells us something about our inner experience that might be informing our outer experience.

In fact, Rumi, the Sufi poet, waxed poetic in “The Guest House” a long time ago about how we should treat every emotion as a visitor, without looking to get rid of any of them, and instead work to understand their message and purpose.

What Rumi alluded to in his writing was also recently confirmed by research that indicates that well-being is actually predicated on having a wider range of emotions. The more you can feel—in all of feeling’s iterations—the better off you are.

2. To have emotions is to have a compass

At one point in the film, Joy tries to keep Sadness away from Riley. Although she felt other emotions, the inability to feel sadness, coupled with her mother’s request for Riley to stay happy, ultimately lead to a cold and numb existence. This state only generated poor judgment and unhealthy choices. It wasn’t until she felt sadness that Riley was able to see more clearly and reach out for support. Acknowledging and understanding emotions is much healthier, productive, and adaptive than ignoring their importance.

3. Our realities and memories are filtered through our emotional lens

Just like our present reality is seen through the framework of our past experience, the memories we look back on are colored by our present-moment experience. In Riley’s case, she recalled a championship hockey game several different times during the movie. At one point, she remembers missing the winning shot and feeling sad about it. At another point, she literally remembers the same moment, but this time, she recalls smiling as she is championed by her teammates who pick her up onto their shoulders to let her know how valuable she is to the team. Same memory, the only difference being that it was recalled through a sad lens, and then through a joyful lens.

This is a very powerful idea. What we really “need” to remember is that our memories are a part of our personal narrative, and that in many ways, we construct the narrative we believe. Because we create the narrative, we can change our story at any time. We can’t delete certain paragraphs that contain with negative facts and daunting realities. We can’t cut out chapters that we would rather not have had—they will always be there, and that’s okay. Research suggests that the actual experiences we have are less impactful than the story we tell ourselves about them.

4. Having the language to talk about emotions is empowering

Probably the most remarkable part of the movie is its existence as a film that focuses on emotions. As long as more than a modicum of scientific integrity exists, what’s important is that an illustration of the concept of emotion can now impact the dialogue we have with our children.

If children learn earlier on to embrace the way they feel, and that it’s crucial to feel all of their emotions, we can hope to see more adjusted adolescents and adults. Really, though, animation aside, this movie’s target audience is feasibly all of humanity. Why? Because to have the language to talk about our emotions, in all of their iterations, is to be empowered with an ability to learn from them, to respond to them with the utmost of compassion, and approach them with less judgment.

5. Feeling our emotions is a universal human experience

Pixar knew what it was doing when it used 5 scientifically validated universal emotions, stemming from Dr. Paul Eckman’s work (the 6th universal emotion is surprise). Through Eckman’s research, he showed that certain emotions are felt and expressed through universal facial expressions across cultures around the world. And so, the movie reminds us of our intrinsic humanity, how similar we all actually are despite our differences.

This is a very powerful idea, especially in the wake of discriminations based on skin color and/or gender/sexual identity. At the end of the day, no matter who you are, you experience the capacity for the same range of emotions. Therefore, if we can realize that we are all just fighting our own hard battles, we might experience this world with more compassion and less judgment.

This post is adapted from BrainCurves.

Another in our bi-weekly series in which we analyze movies currently in release. Why? To quote the writing mantra I coined over 5 years ago: Watch movies. Read scripts. Write pages. You will note which one comes first. Here are my reflections from that post about the importance of watching movies:

To be a good screenwriter, you need to have a broad exposure to the world of film. Every movie you see is a potential reference point for your writing, everything from story concepts you generate to characters you develop to scenes you construct. Moreover people who work in the movie business constantly reference existing movies when discussing stories you write; it’s a shorthand way of getting across what they mean or envision.
But most importantly, you need to watch movies in order to ‘get’ how movie stories work. If you immerse yourself in the world of film, it’s like a Gestalt experience where you begin to grasp intuitively scene composition, story structure, character functions, dialogue and subtext, transitions and pacing, and so on.

Let me add this: It’s important to see movies as they get released so that you stay on top of the business. Decisions get made in Hollywood in large part depending upon how movies perform, so watching movies as they come out puts you in the same head space as reps, producers, execs, and buyers.

This week’s movie: Inside Out, screenplay by Meg LeFauve & Josh Cooley and Pete Docter, story by Pete Docter & Ronaldo Del Carmen, additional dialogue by Amy Poehler & Bill Hader.

Our schedule for discussion this week:

Monday: General Comments
Tuesday: Plot
Wednesday: Characters
Thursday: Themes
Friday: Takeaways

For those of you who have not seen the movie, do not click MORE as we will be trafficking in major spoilers. If you have seen Inside Out, I invite you to join me in breaking down and analyzing the movie.

My principle for Theme is this: Theme = Meaning. And often, it’s more specific: What is the emotional meaning of the story?

When it comes to Inside Out, the story is all about emotions. So why not pose a question I ask of my writing students as they develop their stories: What do you want the audience to feel when they emerge from the movie theater?

It’s easy to say, “Hey, I want them to feel good.” But why? And how? What are the narrative elements which will make them feel good?

In Inside Out, we have the proverbial ‘happy ending’. Riley reunited with Mom and Dad. She reconnects with a part of her Midwest self — visualized through her involvement in hockey. Notably she does not head out onto the ice and immediately become a goal-scoring machine. In fact, she messes up a few times. But in the end, that’s okay. The message seems to be, life isn’t perfect. Our emotions are fluid, organic, and have a vitality of their own. They are powerful agents capable of steering us here and there.

However as unruly as they are, it’s okay to have them. To feel them. This is a lesson which all the key players learn:

* Mom and Dad learn to allow Riley room to have her sad feelings about the move.

* Riley learns not to run away from her feelings, but have the courage to share them with others.

* The Emotions — and especially Joy — learn each of them has a legitimate place in Riley’s life, not just dominated by Joy, but sharing Riley’s psychological space.

So one theme is this: Your feelings exist and deserve to be recognized. Indeed, if you don’t acknowledge them, they can cause havoc in your life.

What other themes do you see in play in Inside Out? I look forward to seeing your observations in comments.

Comment Archive