Inside Out

I can finally present you Pixar’s “Inside Out”!
“Inside Out” is about eleven-year old Riley. Riley lives together with her parents in the Midwest. She loves hockey and her family, her friend, goofing around and is always very honest. These things also happen to be her personality-islands, which were activated in certain points of her life. In her head – actually in everyone’s head – five emotion control her live, her actions and (of course) her emotional state. These emotions are Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and Fear (Bill Hader). Every moment in Riley’s live is lead by a certain emotion and gets saved in a globe with the colour of the specific emotion (yellow for Joy, blue for Sadness, red for Anger, green for Disgust and purple for Fear) . Most of her live Riley is happy, but all is about to change, when she and her family move to San Francisco. They get a new house, she gets to go to a new school, loses her dearest friend and on top of that the truck with all the furniture is accidently on its way to Texas. The first day of school went badly wrong and her parents don’t understand her. The reason, she cries in front of the whole class, is that her teacher wants her to tell about her old home. Sadness touches a memory and it went from happy to wrong. Joy wants to fix it and both of them get sucked into a tube that leads to the long term memory. Now Disgust, Anger and Fear are left alone back at headquarters. This means that Riley can only feel these emotions. For the worst the core memories are sucked in, too and now she doesn’t really have a personality anymore. It is like Riley got into depression. Down in long term memory Sadness and Joy are teaming up with the long forgotten imaginary friend of Riley to get back to headquarters to fix everything again.
I loved how the animators designed the characters and the inside of Riley’s head. I think that it is very interesting to discuss the topic of emotions in a children’s movie and the way they did it was absolutely lovely. It was so fun to watch and made me think about certain ways I react to different situations. But I was confused that Riley only has one positive emotion. I think you can feel other positive ones beside joy too, such as excitement, hope and love. I also didn’t like the character of joy that much. She treated sadness as an outcast and shut her out of the group. Joy, as the only happy emotion should be helping and not discouraging her. I was very happy with the ending and I really suggest staying for the credits, because they show the emotions inside of other people like the teacher, the bus driver, a cat, a dog, a cool girl at Riley’s school, a girl at a pizza shop and a clown. “Inside Out” gets seven lemon drops (three lemons).