Inside Out

Inside Out

Inside Out is a movie about learning to handle the emotional turmoil we will face as we grow up. The movie is centered on an 11 year old girl named Riley who just moved from Minnesota to a new home in San Francisco after her father gets a new job. Riley is guided by the emotions that she feels, and these emotions are personified as characters inside her head. The names of the characters that play the role of her emotions are named according to the emotion they represent- Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear. These emotions help her to get through life. Moving to a new home also has them struggling to adjust and creating havoc during their efforts to make Riley comfortable.

Riley’s memories are represented by small glowing balls that are colour-coded by the particular emotion that stood out during that experience. They are classified and shipped to long-term memory and short term memory locations using a vacuum tube transportation system. Some of these memories which are not important are tossed into an abyss (something like the trash bin on a computer). There are some memories that are saved as core memories and they power the “personality islands” in her head that define who she is. These islands are devoted to themes such as family, friendship and hockey.

The "core memories" are knocked from their containers during a struggle between Joy and Sadness. These memories get accidentally vacuumed up. The two emotions try to bring them back but as a result are themselves sucked up through the tube. They are thrown into Riley’s emotional interior and are lost through mazes of stacked up memory balls. From here the movie is a fast paced race to prevent the core memories from being last or deleted. While Joy and Sadness are in the pursuit of saving the core memories and returning back, the Headquarters is run by the rest of the emotions. Fear, Anger and Disgust have Riley doing things that isn’t normally her.

We are also let into Riley’s parents’ heads for brief glimpses at how the emotions work inside them. The system represented in the movie is designed like a computer and emotions as feelings that can be expressed with the hit of buttons on a keyboard. There are many fun pun-names given to things in this imaginary world, like ‘The Headquarter’ which is located in Riley’s head and ‘The Train of Thoughts’ that carries us through Riley's subconscious.

The final message that the viewer get is that there is no place like home and that Home is a state of mind. Riley realizes that if her parents are with her, she is at home no matter what the outside world has to offer.