17/5/2020
There have been lots of fantastic animations looking at the macrocosm surrounding us. But how about going into an inner world inside ourselves? Here, Pixar’s award winning animation film Inside Out (2015) provides a creative access to looking into our human’s inner spiritual world, and focusing on emotions as a crucial part of our daily life. In this film, director visualises the inner world as a complex mechanical country with a control centre and many diverse cities built by person’s memories from real-world objects in different stages of life, and five emotion representatives—joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust—are the main workers of the centre. It reveals that most emotions expressed by characters from this film appear to be the results of these workers collaboration in daily life.
Based on such setting background, the story concentrates on a girl Riley’s sudden experience about a disorder of her emotions and feelings when she follows her parents moving into a new environment, confronting an unacquainted school and classmates, and experiencing a stressful atmosphere of the family due to the bad luck from works and the house. Instead of depicting these external impacts, this film expresses this disorder as an unexpected trip taken by Joy and Sadness outside the centre so that the left members have to take over control temporarily. During this trip, Joy and Sadness witness the self-demolition of many cities—they call islands like Goofball Island and Friendship Island in the inner world, then encounter a funny guy—a pink elephant Dream and make huge efforts to back the centre.
As usual, the film Inside Out maintains Disney’s mainstream comedy style and 3D computer-making process, choosing a classical structure of the storytelling from problem-raising to problem-solving. But we could also see some scientific evidences from the story. For instance, a recent study shows that happiness is more than just an experience of joy and positive emotions. It could be a result of both positive and negative emotions. As in this film, Joy feels annoyed about Sadness in the beginning and wants to control Sadness’ behaviour like making her stay within a circle. So when Sadness creates a core memory ball, Joy immediately wants to change it and makes a terrible mess in the centre, leading to an accidental trip with Sadness. Ultimately, Joy backs the centre under the cooperation with Sadness and alters her attitude to Sadness. It reveals that after the teamwork of both Joy and Sadness Riley becomes happier with her new life.
It is interesting to look at the characters’ design in this film. We can see the ideas on colours expression of these five emotion representatives such as Joy in bright yellow, Sadness in blue, Anger in red, Fear in purple and Disgust in green. And each character has an exaggerating silhouette of body like Fear in a slim and tall body, Sadness in a round and short body with slow movements, and clearly Anger in a short but strong body with an irritable personality. Moreover, the main character Joy is depicted as a healthy body with an onion-like head. Here, colours make sense in strongly connection with the emotions and can even enhance our feelings about each emotion.
However, as far as I am concerned, there could be two issues in this film. One is that all the workers in the creative country have individual personalities. For example, Joy also has the feelings of sadness and anger even though she represents positive emotions in Riley’s world. This kind of design might set a premise that these workers are not only the elements of this world, but real existences in this world. Another is the dream producing part in this story. It is apparently shown that the directer describes the dream production as a stage show with camera manipulated by workers. But from my perspective, I think dream may not work like such a mechanical process and even the scientists could not figure out the rules of dream nowadays. Like human’s consciousness, I see dreams more like a higher dimension of operation from souls and hearts. Thus, dreams seem to be too sophisticated to be depicted only as an industry.
Although I have some comments about the idea of dream part, I think the whole animation is still a fantastic creation from the observation of real life. It also provides an inner angle for both children and adults to look inside and deal with the psychological issues with emotions during the growing-up process.