I'm already hyped about Pixar's 'Inside Out'!

[Sir_T-Cups]

@Skywatcher

Remember the dad trying to bring out Riley’s inner goofball? Which failed because that core memory was no longer present.

But the whole reason goofball island fell wasn’t because Riley was so distraught over what happened that she couldn’t muster the fake-joy of playing with her dad, it was because the emotions in her head lost the fundamental being in which being a goofball was set. She didn’t choose to not be a goofball, she literally couldn’t because the ability wasn’t there and was thus out of her control

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.

@Barbarian

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.

These points are both great points that you’re realizing in retrospect, or to counter my argument. And while they’re great points, they’re never specifically alluded to in the movie, you’re making that inference yourselves. Neither Riley herself, nor her parents, nor the emotions, nor some (not actually in the movie) psychologist or guidance counselor or something to that effect comes to this realization. The closest we get is Joy realizing that a period of joy came from sadness, and that she can’t be the dominant emotion the whole time. This can be extrapolated by us, but even Joy had this epiphany from the viewpoint of how it affected HER, not Riley. I should let the other emotions be in control, I see that their important, not Riley needs the other emotions

[Chronos]

Quoth MaxTheVool:

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?

Nah, it just made for an entertaining scene.

Of course. It’s just that, enough of what was going on was metaphorically accurate, that the points where it wasn’t sort of stand out.

And I don’t think it’s really accurate to say that “we are in control of our emotions” or “our emotions are in control of us”. I think it’d be closer to say “our emotions are us”. Or at least, they’re a major component of what makes us us. There’s something that’s going on inside of our skulls, and the movie was a reasonable analogy for what that something is.

[Skywatcher]

@Sir_T-Cups

These points are both great points that you’re realizing in retrospect, or to counter my argument. And while they’re great points, they’re never specifically alluded to in the movie, you’re making that inference yourselves.

Did we watch the same movie?

Neither Riley herself, nor her parents, nor the emotions, nor some (not actually in the movie) psychologist or guidance counselor or something to that effect comes to this realization. The closest we get is Joy realizing that a period of joy came from sadness, and that she can’t be the dominant emotion the whole time. This can be extrapolated by us, but even Joy had this epiphany from the viewpoint of how it affected HER, not Riley. I should let the other emotions be in control, I see that their important, not Riley needs the other emotions

I suspect that you somehow missed one particular moment: Joy recognizing how Sadness is able help that one specific denizen I mentioned earlier and, by extent, how Riley needs Sadness. Which doesn’t really hit home until later.

[Loach]

@Barbarian

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.

I was wondering if I was the only one that noticed that. Sadness was in charge in Mom’s head, Anger in Dad’s.

[Sir_T-Cups]

@Skywatcher

Did we watch the same movie?I suspect that you somehow missed one particular moment: Joy recognizing how Sadness is able help that one specific denizen I mentioned earlier and, by extent, how Riley needs Sadness. Which doesn’t really hit home until later.

Yes she did have that moment, but that’s what I was talking about at the end of my previous post that she had it out of selfishness. It wasn’t that Riley needed the other emotions to have a more fulfilling life, it was that she needed to back off because there are more emotions in this world than just herself.

The overall health and wellness of Riley never factored into the equation. Other than obsessing about the core memories running the islands, the emotions never really did anything resembling helping the situations as they came up.

Maybe at the end when Anger had his bright idea, but other than that it wasn’t a matter of growing up or taking one for the team for her family

[JSexton]

@Sir_T-Cups

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.

See, I strongly disagree with this. The emotions aren’t distinct characters, really, they are aspects of Riley. Remember when Joy kept catching Sadness touching all the memories and turning them blue? And Sadness couldn’t explain why she was doing, she just was? That’s depression right there. Riley was depressed, and that’s what happens, you’re sad for no specific reason, and even things that used to make you happy just don’t anymore.

And that’s how it works for real-world humans, too. You think you’re in control, but the reality is, the chemicals in your brain control everything you are. Same with Riley, only the chemicals in her brain were neatly personified into five little humanoids.

[Sir_T-Cups]

@JSexton

See, I strongly disagree with this. The emotions aren’t distinct characters, really, they are aspects of Riley. Remember when Joy kept catching Sadness touching all the memories and turning them blue? And Sadness couldn’t explain why she was doing, she just was? That’s depression right there. Riley was depressed, and that’s what happens, you’re sad for no specific reason, and even things that used to make you happy just don’t anymore.

And that’s how it works for real-world humans, too. You think you’re in control, but the reality is, the chemicals in your brain control everything you are. Same with Riley, only the chemicals in her brain were neatly personified into five little humanoids.

But again, this was for you to infer, not the movie telling you this.

[actualliberalnotoneofthose]

A movie that tells you everything sounds terrible, like a bad country song or something.

[Skywatcher]

@Sir_T-Cups

Yes she did have that moment, but that’s what I was talking about at the end of my previous post that she had it out of selfishness. It wasn’t that Riley needed the other emotions to have a more fulfilling life, it was that she needed to back off because there are more emotions in this world than just herself.

The overall health and wellness of Riley never factored into the equation. Other than obsessing about the core memories running the islands, the emotions never really did anything resembling helping the situations as they came up.

Maybe at the end when Anger had his bright idea, but other than that it wasn’t a matter of growing up or taking one for the team for her family

<imagine the teacher’s Anger here>

[Skywatcher]

From https://thedissolve.com/features/interview/1075-pete-docter-on-the-goals-and-milestones-of-inside-/:

The Dissolve: There are relatively few situations in the film where the emotions seem to be controlling Riley. They give her the idea of running away, and they seem to make her slide down a bannister, but mostly they just affect how she observes or reacts, not what she does. How did you think about the balance between them being in control and her being in control?

Docter: We had earlier versions where they had a microphone at the console, and would suggest things she should do or say. That got us into a big problem. The story is told from a parent’s point of view. We needed Joy to have this loving relationship with Riley. If Riley’s a big robot Joy can control, that’s a lot less understandable, so we stripped all that out. It also mirrors the way our own emotions work. We don’t choose to be angry, it happens to us, but what we do with that is up to us.

[Sir_T-Cups]

@Skywatcher

From https://thedissolve.com/features/interview/1075-pete-docter-on-the-goals-and-milestones-of-inside-/:

Man, I just do not see that.

There were times when the emotions fought with each other to take control, and Riley would act accordingly (snapping at dad at dinner for example), but the reason that she was angry was because: A. Anger strongarmed disgust and fear as the dominant emotion (proving the director’s point), and B. she physically couldn’t be joyous or sad even if she wanted to because the emotions literally couldn’t be accessed (“proving” my point
[quotes used since it’s not like my point can ever be proven]
)

If you wanted to prove all of that by using full gamut of emotions, why take two of them away?

[Skywatcher]

From http://nerdist.com/finding-the-joy-in-sadness-with-inside-out-director-pete-docter/:

[Sadness] is in touch with some part that she knows, ‘This is what Riley needs’ and yet she’s also such a people pleaser that she’s all like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to!’…So she’s compelled to do these things that she herself doesn’t fully understand till later in the film.

[Skywatcher]

This wasn’t here when I started composing the above.

@Sir_T-Cups

If you wanted to prove all of that by using full gamut of emotions, why take two of them away?

At its core, Inside Out is a coming of age story. The writers felt they had to pair off Joy with one of the other emotions, originally intended to be Fear, for her to come to terms with the fact that she won’t be Riley’s center anymore.

Pete Docter Explains The Journey To Understand Sadness In 'Inside Out'

Joy is looking down the barrel of [realizing] she’s only going to be running things for a small amount of time. She’s like “I’m not going to let that happen.” So we wanted to kind of really showcase that to the audience as well, that Joy is not running the dad or mom, it’s one of these other characters. We weren’t trying to say anything sort of blanket about men or women at all, it was just… you have a temperament – everybody has a temperament. Though they might be happy [for a while] they’ll go back to being sort of sullen, to their general sullen temperament. Or angry. I mean Louis Black, man, he would – we would be recording and he would kind of get tired and then he would go on a rant about the megamall in Minnesota and he’d be like [ANGRY SOUNDS] Alright, I’m back! It was almost a healing, relaxing thing for him to be angry. He enjoyed it.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

@Sir_T-Cups

Man, I just do not see that.

There were times when the emotions fought with each other to take control, and Riley would act accordingly (snapping at dad at dinner for example), but the reason that she was angry was because: A. Anger strongarmed disgust and fear as the dominant emotion (proving the director’s point), and B. she physically couldn’t be joyous or sad even if she wanted to because the emotions literally couldn’t be accessed (“proving” my point
[quotes used since it’s not like my point can ever be proven]
)

If you wanted to prove all of that by using full gamut of emotions, why take two of them away?

It feels like you’re really trying to force an interpretation of the movie through a very idiosyncratic lens.

The idea that there are times when people cannot feel happy or sad is not remarkable - it’s relatively commonplace. The idea that people express (and are even only aware of) irritation, disgust or snarkiness when they’re actually more fundamentally sad about something is also not particularly remarkable.

It was a good movie. The model of emotions is fine, really quite good, in fact, for what it was. It was not a “realistic” representation by any stretch.

[Sir_T-Cups]

@Hentor_the_Barbarian

It feels like you’re really trying to force an interpretation of the movie through a very idiosyncratic lens.

I wouldn’t say force. I mean I didn’t hate the movie or have a vendetta against it, I just didn’t think it conveyed the message well shrug opinions and all
Also, I think if you have to quote the writer/director from outside interviews to explain his motives, he didn’t explain them well in the movie itself.

[Skywatcher]

@DSeid

Going “flat” after a loss, or really being left only with fear, disgust and anger … not yet letting yourself feel the sadness and move into acceptance?

For a child a move, even only far enough that schools have changed, is a huge stress.

True dat.

Within days turning 11, we moved ~860 miles from rural Illinois to the far northern burbs of NYC. We had to spend about a week eating every meal in our town’s only restaurant because the movers packed the kitchen first. They finally finished some time after midnight one morning and we had to spend the rest of the night in a motel.

When we got to New York, by way of Kentucky and northern Virginia, we had to hole up in a hotel while waiting for the previous owners to vacate our house. That was a hell of a change, going from our tiny town to spending weeks in urban hotels, to a suburban housing development where the interior of every house is virtually identical and they all sit on plots of land not much larger than our previous house.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

@Sir_T-Cups

I wouldn’t say force. I mean I didn’t hate the movie or have a vendetta against it, I just didn’t think it conveyed the message well shrug opinions and all

Sure. Fair enough. I just haven’t heard anything compelling in your argument to convince me that you have a point.

Also, I think if you have to quote the writer/director from outside interviews to explain his motives, he didn’t explain them well in the movie itself.

I don’t think anyone needed to read that quote to understand the movie or to get what was going on.

I don’t mean to come off as attacking you. While I admit to having overblown expectations for the movie that it didn’t live up to, it still did a very good job tackling a subject that is really abstract and won’t resonate with everyone. I could critique it from other perspectives. I’m just not agreeing with your critique.

[Sitnam]

I saw this last night with my 5 year old daughter. I think it was over her head, she kept asking me why people were sad or excited or crying. I thought it was really good, it’s hard for a children’s movie to be touching without being corny with overused tropes.

Throughout the movie I kept getting something in my eye.

[Skywatcher]

@Hentor_the_Barbarian

Sure. Fair enough. I just haven’t heard anything compelling in your argument to convince me that you have a point.

I don’t think anyone needed to read that quote to understand the movie or to get what was going on.

I don’t mean to come off as attacking you. While I admit to having overblown expectations for the movie that it didn’t live up to, it still did a very good job tackling a subject that is really abstract and won’t resonate with everyone. I could critique it from other perspectives. I’m just not agreeing with your critique.

Somewhere there’s a quote from Docter to the effect of “some people simply won’t get this movie.”

Apparently we’ve found one.

[Sir_T-Cups]

I think that I understood the movie, it wasn’t over my head or anything, I just think the moral of the movie wasn’t told IN the movie the way that it’s being interpreted outside of it.

Does anyone remember the scene where Riley is in front of the class better than me? The further away I am from the movie the shittier my memory will get, but IIRC, Riley starts off a bit more chipper, then Sadness just takes control of the board while Joy is doing…other things? And this is the inciting incident of the movie?