You often hear that the arc of a person’s life is determined not by the misfortunes that come his or her way but by how he or she responds to them. It’s not outside the bounds of normal human experience. As gloomy as Riley’s situation is, it’s not extraordinarily gloomy. But Inside Out stops short of catastrophe - or clinical depression. Most of Pixar’s movies are rooted in the pain of loss - of a whole planet ( Wall-E), of a family ( Finding Nemo, Up), or just of childhood, when the world seemed a simpler and more joyful place. Yes, that sounds damn serious for an animated “family” comedy. While Joy labors to keep Sadness (and Fear and Anger) from touching more memory balls, Riley’s entire personality seems on the verge of disintegrating. From HQ, Joy watches in horror as nearby “islands of identity” - Friendship Island, Family Island, Goofball Island, Hockey Island - sink into the mist. The problem is that as memories go, so goes the psyche, until this once-ebullient little girl is suddenly a ball of mute despondency. Thus, when Riley and her family move from bucolic Minnesota to San Francisco, Sadness fingers a golden “core memory” ball - Riley’s recollection of ice hockey with friends - and chills it blue. Their colors, it turns out, may be altered, sometimes with devastating consequences. Here’s the really important part: In Docter’s mind-design, emotions literally color memories, which get stored in small bowling balls that roll in after each new experience, glowing yellow, red, green, purple, or blue. The two more volatile emotions - frazzled, stringy, purple Fear (Bill Hader) and squat, red Anger (Lewis Black) - are plainly male, a bias I’ll leave to men’s-rights groups to protest. Disgust ( Mindy Kaling) is pickle-puss green. Sadness (Phyllis Smith) is a blue, bespectacled lump. Joy ( voiced by Amy Poehler), the movie’s heroine, is a radiant yellow gamine, sunshine personified she spritzes particles of energy when she moves. Joy, Fear, Disgust, Anger, and the especially wayward Sadness have human form, although their shapes, colors, genders, and protean capacities vary. Docter - instinctively in sync with corporate as well as pop culture - has conceived of our head space as a vast, sprawling theme park, its high-tech, vaguely hypothalamic-shaped headquarters located in a central control tower overseen by five emotions working in harmony and, not infrequently, disharmony. Notice I said mind, not brain, since the neuroscience isn’t precise.
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