I do not think that Inside Out is a movie meant for children younger than, say seven. And even then, for them, discussing the movie with a grown up may be helpful.
On the other hand, I guess the movie could be watched on a purely superficial level. After all my son-in-law Nekos took the granddaughters, ages 5 and 2, to see the movie recently, and they seemed to enjoy it. But did they really have any idea what was going on? I'll have to ask them.
Like the novel Pilgrim's Progress or the drama Everyman, the movie Inside Out is an allegory--where five characters in the film represent abstract ideas. In this case, five of the main characters each personify an emotion. There are also three other characters in the movie who are human beings: 11-year-old Riley and her parents.
The two main characters in the movie are Happiness (Joy) and Sadness. Besides the humans, the other characters are Anger, Fear, and Disgust. These five emotions are supposedly the basic human emotions that we feel and that control the way we act or sometimes "act out." That's one of the aspects of the movie that intrigued me: these basic human emotions.
A short bit of research on basic human emotions revealed that some scientists believe that we have four human emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, and anger. Other believe that we have six basic emotions, adding disgust and surprise to the list. The main writer of Inside Out chose to go with the belief in six emotions, but he also chose to leave out surprise. Other scientists come up with seven emotions, and add contempt (hate) to the list. Still others add trust and anticipation to the list of basic human emotions, so that would make nine. Plus add in all of the "complex" emotions, and we are just one emotional heap!
Interesting to note that five of these nine emotions are negative ones. Or as in the movie four out of five of the emotions are negative. (Wow. That's curious. I'll have to think about that more later.) In the movie, it was Happiness that tried to dominate how the 11-year-old Riley viewed the world and felt about the recent move. Her parents had just moved her from Minnesota to San Francisco.
My own parents moved us no less than a dozen times before I reached the age of 17. I was born in Charleston, SC, then moved on to Camden, SC, then on to Chattanooga, TN, where I attended kindergarten, then on to Richmond, VA, then to Madison, TN, where I had some pretty idyllic childhood years, then to Old Hickory, TN. From there, we moved on to Louisville, KY, then there was a very short move to Orange, TX, then back to Madsion, TN, where I spend my best high school years, Then to Wilmington, NC, and then to Grifton, NC, where I graduated from high school. Then on we moved to Seaford, DE. From there I went to college in Murfreesboro, TN.
Now to you, I know those sound only like a listing of cities that my family lived in, but for me, each of those cities has memories--memories--as the movie made clear--that became part of my personality and part of my long term memory bank. Each of those moves informed who I became. I've written a blog post about most of those places. (Sadly, I didn't take the time to write about most of those place until I retired in my 60s. Had I been able to write about those places sooner, perhaps I could have had more peace in my life.)
Back to Inside Out, the movie makes a big deal about Riley having to move to San Francisco when she was 11 years old. It nearly tears her apart, and I could really relate to what she was going through. Her strong "islands" or staples of emotions that informed her personality were family, friendship, ice hockey (her main interest), honesty, and goofball island. As each island crumbled because of the damage caused by the move, Riley began to lose herself.
Joy kept trying to keep or put her back together, but she was not giving Sadness her fair access to Riley's psyche. Riley's mother kept telling her that they needed her to be her usual happy-go-lucky self to counteract all the things that kept going wrong with the move. It was all so familiar to me, and it all made so much sense.
My parents too would depend on me to stay happy during our many moves--but I, of course, felt anything but happy. I felt sad for loss of friendships, and angry for loss of interests (in one high school, the next year, my senior year, I was looking forward to being the literary editor of the school paper, but then we moved). I felt fearful going into new classrooms and seeing that sea of new faces looking up at me. Within my family, we did not discuss these feelings or thoughts. With each move so many questions buzzed through my young mind: would I be able to keep up with the new school work? Had I missed something important that I needed to know? Time and again--at least a dozen times--I lost myself.
But in all those soul-stealing moves and in my parents' constant fighting, I did not allow myself to feel sad. Once I left home for college, I had completely lost myself. College, for me, was a terrible experience, so I ended up marrying Tommy Cooper to escape it and to escape my family, and the rest is history (I've written my memoirs in my blog, which I have linked to several times above).
In the movie, once Riley allowed herself to feel her sadness (and once Joy allowed Sadness to take center stage), she and her parents talked about her and their feelings and comforted her, and Riley is on the way to adjusting herself to the move, to rebuilding her islands, and to finding herself again.
My family of origin lacked two important things that Rily's family had: strong family support and goofiness. For some reason, my family was not demostrative of nor verbal about their love for each other or for us daughters, and my family was always sooo serious. There was never any joking around or family fun. (When families constantly move around, they need to be strong families with strong senses of themselves to survive move after move.) Since my family environment had not been conducive to expressing feelings, as the song states, I began to look for love in all the wrong places.
Once I became a teacher, teaching was my island that I practically based my whole personality on! Then as my marriages didn't work out, friendship became an important island. Finally in my late 30s/early 40s, white water kayaking became a major island for me. In my retirement once teaching island crumbled, I had a hard time adjusting. I had lost myself again! Then art/writing island was born. And once my daughter married and my granddaughters were born, family island became significant. It's fun and interesting to take notice of the islands that inform our sense of self and that create our personalities.
The lesson that the movie Inside Out teaches us so well is that if one is not allowed to feel sadness--to acknowledge so-called "negative" emotions--then her psyche cannot heal and the opposite emotion (happiness in this case) cannot re-surface. It's all so clear to me now. So I ask the Universe, can I go back and relive my teens and college years and twenties, knowing what I know now? Probably not.
An A+ movie. Go see it and have fun! I plan to take Tessa (my five-year-old granddaughter) to see it again! It helped me to understand myself better; perhaps it will help her too.
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