Inside Out: Understanding Emotions Through Animation

According to Sadness, “Crying helps me slow down and obsess over the weight of life’s problems”. Inside Out is a Disney Movie directed by Pete Docter and was released in June 17, 2015. The story starts with an eleven-year old, named Riley, who encounters difficulties in adjusting in their new home after moving out from Minnesota. Aside from Riley, there are also five main characters who portrays as Riley’s emotions. They play a big role in the story because Riley’s feelings depend on the decisions they make. After moving in San Francisco, problems start to pile up as these emotions starts to contradict each other decisions. Every emotion that an individual has is important and shouldn’t be denied like how the other emotions denied Sadness. Emotions does not only affect one’s emotional aspect but it can also affect a person physically, mentally, socially, and spiritually.

According to Collins English Dictionary, “An emotion is a feeling such as happiness, love, fear, anger, or hatred, which can be caused by the situation that you are in or that people you are with.” In the movie, the main theme of the story is about understanding one’s feelings. The writer wrote the roles of the characters in its own psychological beliefs. Joy’s role, coming from her name ‘Joy’ which means happiness, is to make Riley happy in every situation. Anger’s role is to make everything right and equal. Disgust’s role is to protect Riley from poison, physically and socially. Lastly, Fear’s role is to keep Riley away from danger. At first, the importance of Sadness has not yet been seen. Joy keeps Sadness away from touching the core memories to avoid turning happy memories to sad ones. Because of this, Riley is unable to express her sadness and ended up being annoyed by people around her that caused a loss of friendship and a broken relationship with her family. Denying sadness can affect one’s life for one would be frightened and feel uneasy for having a hard time coping up with one’s sorrow. According to Tahir, “Your emotions make you human. Even the unpleasant ones have a purpose. Don't lock them away. If you ignore them, they just get louder and angrier.” Sadness is a way to connect with others. When an individual feels sad, the one next to them would also feel sad because they connect to each other’s feelings and this would help oneself reduce sadness and pain.

The problem with emotions is that it is hard to control. In the movie, there is an incident wherein Riley can no longer control her feelings properly. She changed due to her emotions that lead to having symptoms of an Adjustment Disorder and Depressed Mood wherein she missed her old life and ran away from home. Problems with emotions can also lead to different emotional problem such as depression and anxiety. The scenes in the story is applicable to real life situations and some people have experience the same as hers.

Inside Out informs us that every emotion an individual has is important. An individual should honestly accept one’s feeling including sadness even though it would be painful as it may be. This teaches the audience to first, accept one’s feelings. To accept feelings is to deal them in positive ways and identify them by settling their differences. Denying to accept feelings can cause damage to one’s physical and emotional health. One example on how to accept feelings is to talk to someone which can be a friend or a family. This would help an individual tell them what they feel and release all the stress and problem that has been troubling in their mind. Second, is to learn to understand them. Understanding feelings will help an individual learn to enhance in controlling both one’s actions and emotions. The movie itself changed the perspective of the viewers. Everyone’s point of view is that happiness is all that matters but because of the movie, Inside Out, they learned that they can’t attain happiness if they cannot feel loneliness. In some point of one’s life, emotions can be mixed one at a time wherein Riley cried with her parents and smiled afterwards. In this situation, Joy and Sadness responds to the same situation but sometimes, people can feel more than one emotion at the same time.

Every emotion should help emphasize other emotions just like how Sadness emphasize Joy. At last, Joy learned that not every situation there will be happiness. She realized how important Sadness is and to also accept her. At the last part of the story, more core memories were made with different emotions inside of it. Inside Out is a great movie that is applicable not just for kids but for everyone no matter what gender, age, race and culture one belongs. According to Walker, “If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it.”