And Now for Something Less Depressing: Sadness

Looking back over my blog posts, I realize I have fallen into a sort of serious rut, or a rut of seriousness, so I'm going to talk about a kid's movie: Inside Out.  I should begin by saying that when you combine this with Up, you have two of the most serious tear jerkers that I can think of short of Old Yeller, and Where the Red Fern Grows (movies where bad stuff happens to dogs are usually prime make a grown man cry territory).  This is especially interesting in the case of Inside Out because it is absolutely hilarious and emotionally poignant at the same time.  Up hit you with the montage about the little old man and his wife, and then it was all about the talking dogs.  Inside Out sort of tickles your emotions for a while with sweet little memories of how great life used to be contrasted with how it has really changed for the worse in the life of Riley the character in whose head most of the movie takes place.
Riley is an eleven year old girl, which was particularly important to me, as I currently attempt parenthood of an eleven year old male creature and will soon have an eleven year old female creature living in my house.  The female creature, now nine, has already demonstrated that no one, including her is the master of her emotions.  Riley has four different characters living in her brain: Joy (who was first), Sadness (second), Anger (third, voiced by Lewis Black and worth the price of admission), Fear and Disgust, who sort of work together to keep her safe.
You may have heard of the "Wheel of Feelings," which I like in a sort of tongue in cheek sort of way, but it is actually useful in deciphering the source of some complex feelings. So here it is again:

For the sake of the movie: Fear is purple, Sadness is blue and Anger is Red, Disgust is green and joy is golden (couldn't find a wheel with completely corresponding colors.  Each emotion colors certain memories, and for the most part, while Riley is little, Joy gives her memories a bias towards the golden and happy.  When the family moves from their comfortable home in Minnesota to San Francisco and stuff starts to get stressful, the other emotions start to over-rule Joy.  Sadness especially, an emotion that is sort of dumpy and depressed, who mostly just tries to stay out of the way of an irrepressible and overbearing Joy.  There are several scenes where sadness touches otherwise happy memories and they start to turn blue.

This is absolutely anathema to Joy and she becomes more and more oppressive to Sadness, at one point drawing a circle and telling her to stay in the "circle of sadness."  This leads to chaos, as one might imagine (though apparently not all actual adults realize this danger).  Joy and Sadness get thrown out of headquarters along with crucial core memories that make Riley who she is and help her cope with the world.  The longer Joy, Sadness and the core memories are lost, the worse Riley's ability to cope with life becomes.  The theme of the movie is that Joy needs to learn to let go and value the other emotions and their roles, especially the role of Sadness.

There is so much psychology sort of wedged into the movie that it kept me really paying attention and occasionally chuckling out loud, like the scene about the phases of abstract thought.  But what I was particularly interested in were a couple, possibly minor details.

First of all, there is the fact that most of the other characters in the movie have single gender emotions, while Riley has both male and female (Anger and Fear are male).  Her mother has all female emotions and her father has all male emotions.  Also, while Joy is the dominant emotion in Riley, her mother's dominant emotion is Sadness and Her father's is Anger.

I'm pretty sure these things were not an accident, and they kind of add an even greater amount of depth to a movie that's already pretty deep for a cartoon.