When the first Inside Out movie was released, in 2015, it really torqued my amygdala. How dare these filmmakers describe my feelings so clearly? How do they have my number? I’m supposed to be unique and mysterious, but they eloquently mapped out my moods like a team of home inspectors barging in and taking pictures of my bathroom.
Now, with Inside Out 2, I’m irked even more: How do they still have my number?! The home inspectors are in my other bathroom, too?
But I’ve learned to accept it.
The original Pixar story, which devises an elaborate, well-worked-out metaphor for human emotions, takes the perplexing world of the psyche and makes it cute and palatable, with anthropomorphic day-glo feelings at the helm of a Star Trek-like control bridge, surrounded by vast islands of friendship or personality, and labyrinths of memory resembling multi-hued bowling balls, sorted on high bookshelves, and occasionally plopped into a memory-hole abyss.
Inside Out charted the feelings of a 10-year-old girl named Riley, whose happy childhood is thrown into retroactive chaos after her parents move the family from Minneapolis to San Francisco. Perhaps not coincidentally, this geographical path is the same one taken by Robert Pirsig in the influential book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a work that also maps out thoughts using elaborate metaphors.
Riley’s mind is divided into cute versions of Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. Each one has its own color, and an appropriate voice to match. Joy (Amy Poehler) is perky, Anger (the caustic comedian Lewis Black) is irate, and so on. The standout vocal actor in the bunch is Phyllis Smith, whose Marge-Simpson-meets-Eeyore-like, oddly soothing rendition of Sadness is right up there with Sarah Vowell’s inspired, squeak-strong take on Violet in Pixar’s The Incredibles.
The first Inside Out became a meditation on the sea change a child goes through when the idyllic purity of their childhood begins to crumble away and they see their climb to adulthead looming ahead of them. The metaphor was strongest when it described the way warm, yellow-bright memories of Joy became tinged with the blues of Sadness as they were sorted away — sweet turning to bittersweet. (Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers’s 2009 film, Where the Wild Things Are, tried to capture this too, in its own way.)
Inside Out and Inside Out 2 can at times remind me of shower thoughts, or even pot thoughts: Its metaphor is so complete that it ceases to fit the flow of an entertaining movie. Often it’s whizzing along but I’m still taking a moment to absorb the ramifications of a sensitive idea touched on in a previous scene. (I also got a little tripped up on the anthropomorphism, because the emotions seem to have their own motivations and feelings, as if there’s an infinite regress of squabbling feelings inside of them, too.)
I wonder if kids fully grasp the movie’s idea, and I’m sure they do, but not in the same way as adults. Both Inside Out and Inside Out 2 have dedications at the end, from the filmmakers to their children, and the stories are really statements of empathy that say: We parents understand that you are already complex humans, with vast worlds of emotion inside of you, even if your outward behavior doesn’t always show it. The movies put this idea in tangible terms with more immediacy than the child-development books (like I’m OK — You’re OK) that tend to end up on the shelf collecting dust, or fade into the Orwellian memory hole.
I remember as a kid, I got ahold of a book called T.A. for Tots and Other Prinzes, by Alvyn M. Freed (the “T.A.” stood for “Transactional Analysis”). The book was an earnest attempt to describe kids’ feelings through these little creatures who were either Warm Fuzzies or Cold Pricklies. It started simple but became increasingly elaborate, and I liked how it acknowledged my feelings and described their cause-effect chains.
The Inside Out movies spur similar reflection, though they don’t demand it. My young son really liked the characters, though he’s not fully ready to work out the metaphor. Referring to the personified emotions in Riley’s mind, he later asked me, “Does her brain have parasites?”
At the very least, Inside Out’s schema gives far more to work with than simple divisons like the Freudian id, ego, and superego, which is just a three-tier set of pancakes with a fruit-rich superego on top, a buttered-syrup ego in the middle, and a pile of gristly sausages hiding underneath the id.
The first Inside Out’s emotions make a lot of sense, too: Even as a child, you need Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust for your basic survival. A healthy Fear keeps you out of the street; Disgust keeps you from eating green-fuzz-covered food you find on the floor; Anger can help you punch a clown (if that ever comes up).
The new movie, Inside Out 2, elegantly extends the metaphor. Now Riley is 13, and the control panel in her mind has just been hit with an alarm for puberty. Thankfully, the story doesn’t go into full Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret territory; it avoids physiological changes beyond zits. Instead, the movie covers just a couple of days as Riley goes to an ice-hockey camp. Even during that brief time, massive upheavals are happening in her boundless emotionopolis.
Riley finds out she’s going to a different school than her old friends, and she’s also trying to impress a group of new friends. Because of these changes, Riley feels like her whole future is riding on whether her efforts at camp will result in being selected for the ice-hockey team. As part of this intense phase, a new group of emotions have invaded her mind’s console: Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, Ennui, and Nostalgia. She’s taking her first, dizzying swim in the teen-drama whirlpool.
(We can all be grateful the movie isn’t about a 14-year-old teenage boy. The story would probably turn out closer to the libido-fixated control panel seen in Woody Allen’s 1972 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex… *But Were Afraid to Ask.)
Riley’s psyche has had a small, glowing tree forming in the center of everything, called her Sense of Self. It’s a delicate plant that needs to be regularly fed, and it pulsates and emanates the words, “I’m a good person!” But now that Anxiety has arrived, the Sense of Self has been ripped out and a new plant is growing in its place, blurting out, “I’m not good enough!”
And once again, the movie has my number.
All children should start their life with the sense of “I’m a good person.” Eventually, though, the idea of “I’m not good enough” can be a strong motivator, leading one to strive and have ambition. Both mantras are limiting, and at the extremes, they become self-damaging. People who always believe themselves to be good can end up in denial of their mistakes, or worse, outright egotists — even malignant narcissists. On the other end, people who always think they’re not good enough are simply going to wither, become depressed, or do just enough to survive without reaching for more. At one point, Riley even becomes paralyzed with Anxiety — stuck in a loop. How many among us can relate?
In a way, the scheme reminds me of an album I dug as a kid, Hemispheres by Canadian rock band Rush. Its conceptual title track lays out a Greek-philosophy based dichotomy between Apollonian order and Dionysian nature. The somewhat pat (in that case) conclusion is that balance is the answer.
Inside Out 2 goes a long way to describing a much richer dynamic of finding balance. As with the first Inside Out, the main plot has characters exiled from the control bridge, exploring the outer reaches. The lead character is Joy: She’s the prime mover of most of the events, and she (along with others) has been expelled by Anxiety (whose high-strung voice is well-performed by Maya Hawke, by the way).
A lot of Inside Out 2, like its predecessor, is literally literal-minded. In the first movie, characters actually rode on a Train of Thought. In this movie, they’re stuck beyond a Sar-Chasm (sarcasm). I wonder if my son was speaking across the Sar-Chasm when he told me he thought the little emotions were parasites?
As animation, both movies make the most of imaginative spectacle, as if the writers made a huge list of ideas and organically worked as many into the story possible. The first movie’s creative high point was when characters ended up abstracted into various dimensions. Inside Out 2 has a lot of fun with the idea of a Guilt Vault, where characters hide away memories they don’t want to admit to themselves or others. Parents will most certainly recognize this process, and it reminds me a bit of the Family Circus “Not Me” ghost that haunts children’s evasions of personal responsibility.
I doubt I need to recommend Inside Out 2, as the film made well over a billion dollars within a month of its release. But even non-parents might find it (and the first film) worthwhile as a smart, non-patronizing depiction of the human mind in action. We’re all fighting our own battles where some emotions dominate the others, and need to be kept in check. Inside Out 2 makes an ingenious case for balancing the system.
