Inside Out

Inside Out

In 2015, animation studio Pixar released one of the greatest animation movies of all time. The movie is a burst of imagination. It is truly a masterclass on creativity. It's colorful and bright. It is informative, intelligent, accurate and brilliant. Titled "Inside Out" the movie is about emotional intelligence and takes place in a little girl's head. In the limbic system to be precise - the place in your brain that processes feelings and emotions. The main characters in the limbic system aka "headquarters" are Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fearfulness and Disgust. Riley's life dramatically changes when her parents relocate to the city. All the changes in her life leave her without a campus as she has to start afresh. We see the chaos in her head manifesting as she navigates her world through the advent of her emotions in the limbic system. As the chaos brews, Sadness and Joy are cast out of the limbic system. Throughout the movie Joy expresses that she doesn't understand Sadness' role in Riley's life and this causes an indifference between the two emotions. Because of this label Sadness is billed as an outsider who has no utility. In the context of the emotions, Joy is the most important emotion in the limbic system. As such, she is the head honcho and chief administrator of the control panel in the limbic system. And as the chief, her only duty is to keep Riley happy. Of course, now that her and Sadness are cast out of the limbic system, she has no say anymore. The emotions that have a say are Anger, Disgust and Fearfulness - impulsive and reflex emotions that are dominated by the amygdala. Now that Joy and Sadness are outside the limbic system, they have to work together to get back or Riley runs the risk of never being happy again. It is on this journey that Joy sees the importance of Sadness in Riley's life. It is through this journey that the audience realizes that Sadness might be the most important emotion in that limbic system. Sadness is reflective. It is the primary emotion in emotion regulation because it is expressive and allows for projections and transference. It is effective because we know ourselves because of other people. Sadness is communicative and allows for understanding. It is a lack of understanding of her emotions that causes a rupture in Riley's life. Instead of expressing her feelings, Riley supresses them and it results in the omission of Joy and Sadness in her life - the two fundamental emotions that are central to fulfillment in life. With Joy and Sadness out of the limbic system, Anger assumes the role of the head honcho in the limbic system and plants an idea in Riley's head to run away from home. It is a bad idea, one that lacks proper diagonsis. The problem with anger is that it fosters an illusion of power. It is because of this that Riley accepts the idea of running away. This comes from wanting to do something to conquer the situation. Running away from home has dire consequences, consequences that stop Riley from feeling anything. The remaining emotions (Anger, Disgust and Fearfulness) in the limbic system do everything they can to take out the idea in Riley's head but it's too late. The idea has already been accepted by Riley and she's currently on a bus to Minnesota. Luckily, Sadness and Joy make it to the limbic system just in time, it is then that Joy relinquishes the podium for Sadness. After all, it is only Sadness that can save Riley. Joy gives Sadness the core memories of her past that were once happy so Riley can get closure. This results in Riley finally opening up to her parents. Her parents are emphatic and give a masterclass on emotion regulation. This frees Riley and makes her happy as she starts to formulate new core memories. This moment represents the start of Riley's new life.

The movie also covers the unconscious mind and the subject of personalities. Through core memories an island is constructed that is inallignment with the personality of the memory. For example, there is a "friendship island" and this comes from Riley's friendship with her bestfriend. There is also "family island", "goofball Island", "Hockey Island" and "Honesty island". These islands represent Riley's personalities. All these personalities create the self which is Riley - the ego. Sigmund Freud stated that the ego was the coordinated organization of mental processes in a person. The movie proposes that we are our personalities. Virchow suggests the same thing when he states "the individual represents a unified whole of which all parts cooperate towards a common goal." Psychoanalyst Carl Jung certainly concurs with the movies sentiments when he states "Around our ego gravitate a number of subpersonalites whose relationship to the ego are modified throughout the course of life." This is something we witness in the movie with the construction of new islands after the old ones were destroyed. Time destroys these islands or in the case of psychology personalities and as evolving beings we need to be constantly creating new ones and redefining ourselves. Jung continues "The persona is the sum total of the conventional attitudes that an individual adopts because he belongs to certain groups: occupation, social class, caste, political party or nation." In a nutshell, the human ego is composed of many personalities, distinct though side by side and more or less closely connected. Our personality thus changes from moment to moment, depending on the circumstances, the places and the people we are with. Your crush from high-school is not the same person anymore, she is now a mother and somewhat happily married. She is a career woman escalating to the top of the corporate ladder. This is because what influences her fundamentally, her surroundings, the people, culture has dramatically changed and she has to adopt and blend in like a chameleon to the times and this affects her personality - her world, her everything. Change is the essence of being. It is continual and infinite. This is what happens to Riley in the movie, she is forced to change everything about her and this results in a change of the subpersonaltites and of the self. This is the central point of the movie.

Nietzcshe conceived the unconscious as the area of confused thoughts, emotions and instincts, at the same time as an area of reanactment of past stages of the individual and of the species. This is what we see when the movie delves into the unconscious of Riley. We see what lurks in the darkness. We see her fears; we see grandma's vacuum cleaner and a big scary clown. The movie also explores sleep and dreams. We learn that sleeping is vitally important for the transfer of short term memories to long term memory. Also, we learn that sleep helps reset the brain and body health each day. We also learn about REM sleep (Rapid eye movement); the stage in which humans principally dream. We learned that in this state the brain is active and creative. Sleep principally has two stages. NREM (Non-rapid eye movement) sleep and REM (Rapid eye movement) sleep. We flip-flop back and forth between NREM and REM sleep throughout the night every ninety-minutes. NREM sleep helps transfer and make safely newly learned information into long-term storage sites of the brain. But it is REM sleep that takes these freshly minted memories and begins colliding them with the entire back catalog of your life's autobiography. All of this is beautifully depicted in the movie. The movie explores the subjects of psychology, emotional intelligence and neuroscience in a beautiful and well-thought out way. The representations and archetypes are easy to comprehend. The story is heartfelt and easy to relate with. This is a great movie!