My nephew asked about that on the way home from the theater. We (my sister and I) explained it as just being a narrative device: We’ve got the whole movie to develop Riley’s emotions, so we can afford to make them all distinct characters and all distinct from Riley, but we only get brief glimpses into anyone else’s head, so we have to have a shorthand to tell us at a glance “these are Mom’s emotions”.
And a move across the country probably isn’t enough to prompt such a bad breakdown… most of the time. Had the events of the movie gone just a little bit differently, Sadness would have blued a couple of core memories, the whole team would have stayed in Headquarters and tried to figure it out, and we would have smoothly transitioned to the multicolored memories without any major trauma. But sometimes, something like a move really can set off severe depression like that.
I don’t think it was just the move - it was the combination of the move, the fact that the moving van didn’t show up so she didn’t have any of her familiar stuff, the seriously depressing house and surroundings she had to live in, and the fact that her dad was stressed out about his business. All of that’s got to be pretty traumatic for a sensitive kid.
In my spoiler above I list two tear-jerker moments. The first was definitely evoked due to my being a parent. The second, though, was mainly from the perspective of being a person - empathetically casting myself in the centre of that scene. (with a dash of parental perspective too)
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, and as much as I try to, I just plain didn’t like it.
I was right about Phyllis Smith being a great choice for Sadness.
I hate when I’m being reminded that I’m watching a cartoon. To the film’s credit, Reilly’s world was pretty ‘realistic’, but there were just silly things going on in her brain. It was so silly that it turned me off to feeling any real emotion.
Here’s a for instance:
The way Joy and Sadness got back to headquarters was so lame… filling up a bottomless bag with her imaginary boyfriend then emptying the bag with them perfectly stacked up. Disgust!
Pixar, (and Disney,) have done this to me before. There’s ‘Wall-E’, which is overall a great movie, but I wonder if it would have been even better if they didn’t even include the “cartoony” looking humans.
I would like to see the method they use to make video games merge somehow with computer animation. (with their own physics captured with dynamic camera angles.) It’s more suspenseful that way.
Joy’s successful return to Headquarters bugged me mostly because it was one of the places where the metaphor didn’t work. Just what is actually going on in Riley’s psyche, that can be represented by a human tower of imaginary boyfriends and a trampoline bounce?
I had to leave a few minutes early. Did anything else significant happen after Riley came back home and told her parents she wasn’t happy and they all hugged etc?
We see a flash-forward to a year later, with her (and her emotions) settling in to her new life. It’s mostly just “Rah rah, life is good”, plus a bit of “things get more complicated as you get older”, and some of the funniest scenes in the whole movie.
saw it last night with my husband and three sons, 16, 13, and 9, all of them liked it, in fact the reason we were seeing it was the 13 yr old had been demanding it, so good work marketing dept.
All the boys liked it. No complicated discussion ensued.
Me, I was a little skeptical of the message…
the importance of sadness is to draw people to us so we can be comforted
since I had a life experience like Riley, moving when I was 12 to further my dad’s career (except AWAY from a big exciting city to a more rural place) and I didn’t do anything to hide my sadness. I was actually quite jealous of Riley’s “one year later” since it sure as hell took me a lot longer than a year to make new friends and feel happy. More like 3 years. (although it’s hard to know if I wouldn’t have spent the years 12-15 pretty sad under any circumstances).
In my experience sadness did not draw people to me, even my loving parents were pretty exasperated pretty quick with me. There was a whole lot of “get over it” mixed in with the hugs and sympathy. I’m not saying that was inappropriate either.
I saw it on Friday and I really liked it. I am not a parent and yet there were a few moments I cried. It wasn’t up to the par of my two favorite Pixars; Wall-E and Nemo, but it was quite good, with some very funny scenes.
I agree with whomever talked about the emotional punch of Up. Me and my SO don’t even have children and we were really hit by those first fifteen minutes. And then…dogs in planes (literal dogfighting ).
And Spirited Away is a lovely movie and I highly recommend it! Not a downer at all. Also watch My Neighbor Totoro!
Other than crying at the damn volcano, and crying even more at poor Bing Bong, I was left unimpressed with the movie.
Of my many little gripes, my one main gripe about the movie was that it almost seemed like the message was
[spoiler] We aren’t in control of our emotions, they’re in control of us.
the fact that Riley was happy, sad, scared, or whatever was just whoever took control of the board at that moment, and had nothing to do with Riley herself reacting to her situation. Basically as the movie moves forward and she loses all her islands because her joy and sadness are going away, she inches closer and closer to being a psychopath. It would have been better if sadness kept getting bigger or whatever as Riley got sadder and the other emotions had to deal.[/spoiler]
I also didn’t like the character of sadness. The entire movie happened because sadness suddenly became inept/stupid. Bad things would happen when she would do things, then go right back to doing them for no goddamn reason. She’s sad, not retarded. She would do things and say “I’m sorry I don’t know why I did that”, that’s not sadness.
I didn’t see that as “Sadness suddenly became stupid.” My thought was that Riley was moving toward puberty, which is a huge emotional upheaval, and even the emotions were still dealing with the potential change without being completely sure where it was going. The fact that Sadness kept turning the yellow memories blue, to me, suggested that Riley was beginning to move in the direction she ultimately ended up at the end: more nuanced emotions and memories. When you get older, almost nothing is pure joy, pure sadness, etc. Most memories are tinged with a bit of more than one emotion.
It goes both ways. Riley’s personality islands get triggered without input from Headquarters, indicating the emotions are able to take cues from whatever Riley’s doing.
The entire movie happened because the move has Riley depressed. Riley has never been depressed before so it’s a completely new experience for the emotions and they don’t know what to do. Sadness begins operating on instinct but nobody, including Sadness herself, realizes this. Riley eventually becomes so depressed that she shuts out all emotions except Sadness.
I thought that a fair bit of what happened in brain-land was clearly meant to just be fun and goofy adventures… is there some metaphorical reason why there would be a window made of glass and joy and sadness would be stuck outside it until anger got so mad that literal fire shot out of his head which could then be used to break the window?
But the movie never alluded to this. From the perspective of the film it was the emotions that dictated everything, not Riley dictating the emotions. The reason she didn’t feel anything wasn’t because she was sad over the move, she didn’t feel anything because the emotions, on their own accord, left her mind.
After Joy and Sadness left and did their little adventure Riley never felt sad. She was angry and disgusted and all, but not because she was trying to cope with the move and they were the most appropriate feelings, it was because that was literally all she could feel. Really it was just mere coincidence (slash movie plot convenience) that the emotions were appropriate.
Like I said in the spoiler, the plot would have been better if the characters at some point said “why am I doing this?” or “I feel compelled to do this because this is what she needs” as opposed to "I’m doing this because I think this is what she needs
Remember the dad trying to bring out Riley’s inner goofball? Which failed because that core memory was no longer present.
But that is applying adult reasoning to the emotions of an 11-year-old child. Riley isn’t really capable of such things yet, so neither are they. Which is alluded to in one specific denizen having been created before Riley learned to read.
Isn’t growing up all about controlling your emotions?
You can look at the dominant emotions for Riley’s parents – angry dad, sad mother – but they have evidently learned how to use their emotions to influence their actions.
And that process is evident in the final hockey-playing scene, as you hear the emotions giving <ahem> colour commentary.
I felt it was also pretty obvious that emotions don’t dictate an act but they do colour a response, as indicated by the memory marbles having a different colour.
Saw it Saturday night with my wife, our 10 year old son and my old college roommate.
Adults all teared up and cried at various times, there’s definitely some touching stuff. Son liked the movie and all the other kids in the theatre seemed to be enjoying themselves.
Sniffly stuff:
Riley starting to tear up in class when she has to introduce herself.
Joy struggling frantically to climb out of the forgotten memory pit.
Bing Bong’s last words.
Sadness running the controls and Riley hugging her parents.
Funny stuff:
Workers in long-term memory constantly shooting the obnoxious chewing gum jingle up to HQ to mess with them.
Glimpse into the mom and dad’s emotions when the mom is trying to get the dad to pay attention during dinner.
End scene with the inner workings of everybody’s emotions - my wife was in stitches over the boy at the hockey game (“GIRL! GIRL! GIRL!”), the bus driver (everything is “Anger”) and of course the cat.
The new control board.
I’m tearing up standing here at work thinking about the sad scenes. That stuff is very well done and strikes a deep note, I guess.
