Recently, my wife and I took in the new computer-animated Disney/Pixar movie Inside Out 2. It’s terrific. I’ll avoid any actual spoilers here, but just as in the original movie, the film’s story takes place largely inside the mind of a young girl named Riley. She’s 13 now, and her personified emotions—Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger—are still at the helm of a console, which in effect initiates and calibrates Riley’s responses and reactions to all she encounters out in the world. Inside Riley, it’s Joy who largely controls the console, from which we conclude that Joy is her natural temperament, though each emotion steps forward at different moments depending upon what’s happening to Riley externally.
To complicate matters though, Riley's mind now has a new section called her Sense of Self, where her deepest long-term memories and feelings are stored. Over time, this area of her mind will come to form her core personality. Joy, seeing the importance of this, becomes single-minded about filling Riley’s Sense of Self with only positive memories. She’s even invented a kind of catapult which launches any negative memories that form to the very back of Riley’s mind, so that only the happy ones fill up her Sense of Self.
The writer of the first Inside Out movie and the Executive Producer of the second is Pete Docter, one of the main imaginative forces at Pixar over the last two decades. He started there in 1990 as an animator when he was only 21, and Inside Out was his brainchild. He was also instrumental in bringing a number of other movies to the screen, writing Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Up, Monsters, Inc., Wall-E, and Soul, and serving as Executive Producer on a number of other Pixar films.
Docter says the idea for Inside Out emerged when he began to notice his daughter Elie’s personality change as she grew older. Wondering what was happening to her inside, he conferred with psychologists and neuroscientists, then started to write and storyboard out the plot for what became the movie. In his research, Docter was drawn not only to the science behind how emotions tend to organize our thoughts but in particular how sadness is often crucial in fostering the deepest connections we have with others.
While Docter’s movies aren’t religious in nature, he’s a practicing Christian, devout in his faith, and one can detect spiritual threads stretching throughout many of his films. A podcast interview he gave to Jesuit priest and writer, James Martin, is particularly enlightening about how he thinks about both his craft and his faith (watch here).
A lesson some viewers might take from Inside Out 2 is one I consider spiritual in nature or at least adjacent to it, and that’s how, as we get older, our emotions mix together in such interesting and meaningful ways. We often experience fear with anger. Anxiety with hope. Love with melancholy. And sometimes, just as Docter’s research revealed, sadness and other emotions—which we often connect with suffering—are instrumental in connecting us to one another and, strangely yet reliably, in producing a closeness from which joy, happiness, and satisfaction arise.
A big part of growing up from childhood to young adulthood is the process of grasping the complexity of these, our mixed emotions. Though it’s not entirely central to the film, every once in a while during the show, we’re taken inside the minds of other characters—Riley’s mother and father in particular. As Joy is Riley’s dominant emotion, Sadness seems to be primarily in charge in her mother’s mind, and Anger seems to be the one at the center of the console in her dad’s. This isn’t, however, presented as alarming, and in fact both her parents appear to be concerned, loving, and emotionally well-regulated people. All of their emotions are present in a familiar way within their minds, but each one seems to be working with the others in a manner that symbolizes the presence of a mature and well-adjusted adult mind.
While the movie vividly presents the reasons that adolescence is a particularly stormy and anxiety-ridden time, this remarkable piece of entertainment, which sprung from the creative mind of a thoughtful Christian, in the end conveys not only that there is a place and purpose for all the emotions God has given us but that our mixed emotions can be things of tremendous beauty, magically creating unique alloys to become some of the most valuable and memorable things we have.
God—Thank you for our emotions—the positive ones and even those we think of as negative, and how they mix together to enrich our lives. Amen.
