Emotions In The Movie 'Inside Out'

Over the course of time, sadness has gotten a bad reputation. A person showing signs of sadness is viewed as that person being weak or depressed. Not many people understand that when life gets difficult, one must handle their mental state in a healthy manner and seek help or an outlet to ease their mind. The people who don’t seek help often go through hard stages; for example, they may become obsessed with a happier past time and live their life trying to recreate that happiness in their past life. In addition, the movie Inside Out, by Disney Pixar Animation, we see how showing any emotion other than joy is frowned upon. Inside out is a movie about an 11-year-old girl named Riley, and her five emotions in control of her, which go through a
In the film, Joy is so obsessed with making Riley happy that it blinds Joy to the reality of Riley’s life. Despite Joy’s actions, by the end of the movie she realizes that in order to be truly happy, Riley needs to have an emotional balance of all her emotions. Just like Joy, society creates an image of happiness to people that is unrealistic causing, people buy into this image that they become too preoccupied with having a happy life that they actually end up doing the opposite. It’s been known that “the obsession with happiness may lead some to discount both the presence and the value of the challenging and painful events that are inevitable in our lives — not to mention making us feel inadequate when we fall short of an ideal happiness” (Gregoire). This simply means that being so obsessed with happiness causes a person to forget to value the present and embrace the challenges it brings, in fear that if that person is not feeling happy, it must mean that there is something wrong with
At the end of the film, Joy theorized about cause and effect when she looks back on one of Riley’s “core memories” of an important hockey game in which Riley misses a goal. Looking at that memory, Joy immediately realizes that the sadness Riley felt after missing the winning goal was not just sadness, but through that sadness Riley felt compassion and love from her beloved ones. This was a moment in which Sadness had taken charge of that made Joy realize that it is important for Riley to feel sad in order to help build closeness and security with her parents and friends. What Joy thought of as a potential sad and awful memory, it turned into one filled with deep meaning and great significance. Relating it to today’s society, people in need to understand, that it is ok to feel sad because it’s part of the healing processes for one’s