Animated Thought:

Inside Out and Philosophy of the Emotions

Can movies think? This is a longstanding critical question, usually answered in the negative.
One of the many accomplishments of “Inside Out”... is that it demolishes this assumption.
A.O. Scott1

Few movies have excited me as much recently as Pixar’s Inside Out, one
of the most thoughtful, and thought provoking, animated films ever made. It is
ostensibly the tale of a pre-adolescent girl named Riley, who must deal with the
trauma of her family’s abrupt move from their comfortable life in Minnesota to the
more stressful environs of San Francisco. She has trouble fitting in (as most new
kids do), becomes depressed, and runs away from home. So far, so familiar.
But this is no conventional film. Most of it goes on inside Riley’s head, in
a control room reminiscent of the “What Happens during Ejaculation?” section of
Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex...But Were Afraid to Ask
(1972). Personified embodiments of Anger, Fear, Disgust, Sadness and Joy jockey
for control of Riley’s thoughts and actions, with Joy ending up in the driver’s
seat more often than not. An internal crisis is triggered by the loss of Riley’s core
memories, which Joy and Sadness must retrieve.
In the philosophical review of Inside Out that follows, I propose to interpret
what the film thinks about some important issues in philosophy of the emotions.
In particular, I will relate it to an essay by Brock Bastian, which appeared on the
New Philosopher website in 2013. There, he asks the question “Is the promotion
of happiness making us sad?”, and answers it positively. I believe the film poses

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the same answer. Inside Out questions whether joy should so often be in control of
our emotional life, answers in the negative, and affirms a significant and healthy
role for sadness to play in our experience of the world. These are important claims
in philosophy of the emotions, and I will proceed to show how the film makes
them. Then I will talk a bit about what the locution “The film thinks X” means,
metaphorically speaking.

Is the promotion of happiness making us sad?

Bastian states his thesis in the first paragraph of his posting: “Western culture
places an extraordinary emphasis on happiness – and continuous happiness – as the
goal each of us should strive for in our lives. But we’re increasingly realizing this
goal may actually be making us unhappy.”2 A social stigma has become attached
to sadness, which is so great that we are expected, as Barbara Ehrenreich put it, to
“Smile or Die”.
The stultifying social consequences of these discriminatory attitudes are
radical:
Normal levels of sadness, depression and anxiety are commonly
pathologised and medicalised: viewed as deviating from the desired
norm. Even common malaise is often diagnosed as an illness. Such
negative emotions are treated with a wide array drugs and interventions
designed to quickly and efficiently return us to “normality”. Meanwhile,
the many benefits of negative emotions – such as their creative potential,
importance for interpersonal relations and role in achieving a rich and
meaningful life – are rarely appreciated or talked about. (Ibid)

Bastian thinks that our cultural obsession with happiness has led to a relative
devaluation of sadness, which “...may increase perceived social pressures not to
feel sad, with detrimental consequences for emotional functioning. This possibility
was supported by research my colleagues and I recently published in Emotion,
the journal of the American Psychological Association.”(Ibid) Their research
data confirms Bastian’s contention that the devaluation of sadness is emotionally
unhealthy, and it makes sense that people who are coping with social expectations
not to feel sad end up having more negative emotions on a weekly basis than
those who are permitted to do so. The unsympathetic reception that people who
express sadness often receive tells them they ought to be covering up such negative
emotions. This weakens their already embattled sense of self-esteem: “Social
pressures to feel happy make people feel like they’ve failed when they do feel sad,

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which in turn makes them feel worse.”(Ibid)
So, what should we do in the face of this emotional crisis? Bastian
recommends aiming at something like an Aristotelian “golden mean” regarding
the emotions of joy and sadness: “The good life is found between the extremes of
deficiency and excess, and is therefore best served by a mixture of both pleasure
and pain.”(Ibid) We need to allow ourselves to experience joy and sadness in equal
measures, with each being granted its rightful place in defining our emotional life.
My central thesis is that Inside Out agrees with Bastian on several scores.
In particular, the film both condemns contemporary society’s obsession with
happiness and affirms a positive and creative role for sadness in our emotional life.
The film and the psychologist can hence be said, in a metaphorical sense, to think
alike on these issues, because they make strikingly similar statements.

Personality and Memory in Inside Out

Riley is a moderately happy 11-year-old girl when the film begins. A hockey
player in a hockey state, she has a best friend and a nice home, and is content
with her lot in life. Then her dad makes a career move out to the West Coast,
and everything changes. She soon feels isolated and alone in their grungy San
Francisco apartment. She starts to quarrel with her family and to cut herself off
from everyone. Riley’s Mom chides her for having such a long face, telling her
that the women of the house have to “keep smiling”, and that she must remain the
“happy girl” she always has been. This only makes things worse.
Part of her lethargy and depression is attributed to the loss of several of her
core memories, each of which helps support islands of personality, which define
who she is as a person. As those memories fade, her most prominent personality
traits (goofball island, friendship island, family island, honesty island, etc.)
collapse into the deep abyss of her unconscious mind. She becomes more listless
and despairing, and more desperate to get out.
It is telling to note how the memories were lost in the first place. In the
beginning of the film, Joy will not allow Sadness to hold them, because memories
she touches become tinged with sadness (signified by a bluish color). Hence, Joy
considers it her duty to keep Sadness away from Riley’s memories, and, in the
course of their struggle, both they and the core memories are sucked up the dump
tube and catapulted to the other side of Riley’s mind, where a vast array of long
term memories are stored.
Significantly, Sadness plays an integral role in their successful return to the

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control room. Joy, it turns out, has been too busy cheerleading to read the operating
manuals to Riley’s mind. Sadness, who is more anxious, had done so. But Sadness
is still too depressed to walk, and has to be dragged around by Joy. Despite her
torpor, Sadness directs them out of the distant land of long term memory, and (with
some further help) they board a train back to headquarters.
Meanwhile, in the outside world, Riley tries out for the local hockey
team and does horribly. She becomes virtually catatonic, and longs to return to
Minnesota, where everything seemed alright. She resolves to run away from San
Francisco, and take the bus back to her old home town, On the way to the station,
her parents call, but Anger (in the absence of Joy) is at the controls, and she refuses
to answer. She boards the bus, and readies for the journey. Inside, having returned
to the control room in the nick of time with the core memories intact, Joy lets
Sadness take the helm for the first time. This permits Riley to feel the sadness of
her separation from her parents, and she gets off the bus and heads back to the
apartment.
Then, as the synopsis posted to the imdb website describes it:
Riley walks into her house, and her parents run up and hug her. Joy lets
Sadness hold the core memories, which turn blue with her touch. With
Sadness at the controls, Riley’s able to honestly say that she misses her
old life. Her parents comfort her, and they all talk about the things they
miss. Together, Joy and Sadness make a new core memory with both of
their touches.3

Acknowledging that they feel a real sense of loss allows the family to come
together again. The film ends with Riley happily reintegrated into her new life, and
hockey team.

What the Film Thinks About Sadness, and How to Tell

Pixar’s new movie, “Inside Out,” helped me to understand something my therapist has been
trying to convince me of since I was a teenager: It is okay to feel sad.4

Though some commentators have taken issue with the picture of the mind
that Inside Out portrays,5 the film has received almost universal praise for its
insights into childhood, the emotions, and psychological health. What I will focus
on here are parallels between what the film has to say and Brock Bastian’s essay,
which will provide the primary evidence I am offering for the metaphorical claim
that they “think alike”.
To begin at the most general philosophical level, Inside Out offers a Humean

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take on the nature and role of the emotions. David Hume was famous for claiming,
in his Treatise on Human Nature, that “Reason is and ought always to be the slave
of the Passions.” In its depiction of Riley’s mind, Inside Out puts the emotions
at the controls, and while the consideration of reasons figures into some of their
decisions, rational calculations are mostly beside the point.
To move to the particular subjects of interest here, let me first note that the
film’s director, Pete Docter (Up), hired two prominent psychologists as consultants
on the picture, Paul Ekman and Dacher Keltner. The latter, a Professor of
Psychology at the University of California-Berkeley, has given several interviews
about the meaning of the film. Keltner identifies two very important ideas that he
believes the film got right: “One, [emotions] are really critical to how we look at
the world—our perception and our attention and our memories and our judgment.
They guide us in our handling of really important life circumstances, like moves
and developmental changes. ... [and Two] Emotions shape how we relate to other
people.”6 He cited studies that show that emotions like sadness have a profound
impact on how we remember significant events in our lives.
Keltner also explained why those particular five emotions were chosen to
be in the control room: “The first wave of emotion science focused on those [five]
emotions. There’s a paper coming out, authored by Paul Ekman, where he surveyed
a couple hundred emotion scientists and there’s a lot of consensus: Yeah, those are
the emotions that are a part of our nervous system and our identity.”(Ibid)
Towards the end of the interview, Keltner gets down to discussing the
ultimate point of it all: “... this movie is telling people to embrace your emotions—
it’s OK if you get angry from time to time. There is some reason why you’re doing
it. It also shows you how important art is in advancing our understanding of human
nature.”(Ibid) Getting more specific on what it is saying about sadness, Keltner
continues:
We know scientifically that a girl Riley’s age is going to lose a lot of joy.
They’re going to feel sad, and they’re going to really lose a sense of self
confidence; they have this drop in self-esteem. Parents, when they see
it, are absolutely shell shocked. And then sometimes people are saying,
“Maybe you should put her on medication.” But what the film says is this
is just part of growing up and it’s OK.(Ibid)

Moreover, according to Keltner, Inside Out goes beyond simply accepting

such sadness as inevitable:

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 One of the things I really resonated with is that we have a naive view in
the West that happiness is all about the positive stuff. But happiness in
a meaningful life is really about the full array of emotions, and finding
them in the right place. I think that is a subtext of the movie: The parents
want Riley to just be their happy little girl. And she can’t. She has to have
this full complement of emotions to develop. (Ibid)

Now, let me explain one of the most fundamental ways the narrative of the movie
“says” these things.
In its early scenes, Sadness is relegated to the background, and seen as a
purely negative threat to the cheery memories at Riley’s core. Lazy and depressed,
she is pushed around by Joy and felt to be a drag on the group. Yet, by the end of
the narrative, she has saved the day. This shows Sadness in a positive light, which
implies it should be granted its proper role in a healthy emotional life. As sadness
is of value to Riley, so, we are to conclude, it is for us as well.
Anxiety about the future led Sadness to consult the manuals of the mind
when Joy didn’t, helping to develop a crucial practical skill. In addition, the core
memories are seen to be appropriately tinged with sadness at the end. Nostalgia for
a period that is now past is painful, but inevitable, especially for an eleven-year-
old on the brink of leaving her girlhood behind. It was totally understandable that
Riley felt sad about the family’s abrupt relocation, and it was only healthy for them
to admit their sadness and feelings of loss in order to get on with their new life.
In an Op-Ed piece jointly written for The New York Times, Keltner and
Ekman noted that one of the greatest values sadness has is that it helps people to
come together in the face of loss. This is the message of the end of the film, where
the family only reunites when Riley and her father can admit to how much they
miss Minnesota, and commiserate over this loss together. The expert consultants
conclude their article as follows:
“Inside Out offers a new approach to sadness. Its central insight: Embrace
sadness, let it unfold, engage patiently with a preteen’s emotional
struggles. Sadness will clarify what has been lost (childhood) and move
the family toward what is to be gained: the foundations of new identities,
for children and parents alike.”7

The parallels with Brock Bastian should be clear. The failure of both Riley
and her family to confront and embrace the sadness associated with their relocation
resulted from our culture’s preoccupation with happiness. This is expressed in
what Bastian identified as “the perceived social pressures not to be sad” (e.g. from

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Riley’s mother), which increased her emotional suffering. As he predicted, in
feeling unhappy, Riley felt she had failed, which made her feel worse.
Bastian recommends we seek an Aristotelian relationship between the
emotions of joy and sadness, with each being indulged in only moderately, and
with recognition of their equal significance. This is precisely the note on which
Inside Out concludes. Another reviewer captured the significance of the ending
perfectly:
...as Joy and Sadness wend their way back to HQ, what they both come
to understand is that misery is as important a part of life as is happiness.
And, more fundamentally, they realize that happy memories are often
the ones that make us saddest, and that misery (both past and present)
is frequently what inspires in us the greatest feelings of elation, and
what binds us to one another—thus inspiring the delight and comfort of
togetherness.8

Having reconciled these apparent opposites, Riley forms a core memory

of the reunion with her family that Joy and Sadness have shaped together. That
precious memory helps support a more complex set of islands of personality in our
last glimpse of her insides.
Finally, let me specify what Inside Out thinks, and explain what I mean
by claiming it does. I have thusfar drawn on comments by the psychological
consultants for the film, popular reviews, and my own analysis of its narrative arc,
to make certain claims about what the film is “saying”, and hence about what it
“thinks”. To summarize, I believe that various developments in the film’s narrative
clearly imply the following five statements:
1) Emotions play a central role in determining how we act in, and react
to, situations.
2) Contemporary culture is overly obsessed with the pursuit of happiness,
which it mistakenly sees as requiring the minimization of pain and
sadness. Like most obsessions, this does more harm than good.
3) It is perfectly alright to be sad, especially at times and in situations
(like the loss of childhood, or abrupt relocation) where it is emotionally
appropriate to do so.
4) Furthermore, sadness makes a positive contribution, both to our
understanding of situations and to our long term pursuit of happiness.

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 5) Hence, we should embrace the ideal of Aristotelian moderation in our
emotional life, granting both joy and sadness their rightful places. This
approach best promotes psychological health and emotional well-being.

At the very least, 1) and 5) are clearly philosophical claims.

If we asked someone what they think about the above issues, they might say
some of the same things. Now, obviously, to talk about an art work as “thinking
X” is a metaphor. Daniel Frampton to the contrary notwithstanding, there is no
“filmind”.9 But I do believe it makes sense for me to say metaphorically, on the
basis of the parallels I pointed out, that Brock Bastian and Inside Out think alike.
What that means is that they both make (or imply) the 5 statements I have just
identified. The statements Bastian made in prose were identical to those implied in
the film’s narrative.
Let me conclude by addressing the stated intentions of director Pete Docter,
which confirm what the film is saying. Docter reports that its initial impetus came
from him noticing that his 11 year old daughter looked more sullen and unhappy in
contemporary photos than in photos from earlier in her childhood. This led him to
attend a conference on child psychology in 2010, where he first met his eventual
consultants. In an interview for the Screen Rant website, Docter explained that “...
the film originated in this idea of not wanting your kid to grow up and holding onto
childhood and trying to preserve that, knowing full well that it’s impossible to do
so. And as the film evolved, it really grew to be about embracing and understanding
sadness.”10
In that connection, Docter continued: “Sadness is a useful emotion and a
normal, healthy emotion, and there’s a time when it’s really necessary. If you try
to suppress it, you are going to do longer damage. Even though it seems painful
and negative, it is a part of life.”(Ibid) This is what the director of the film thinks
about these issues, and my analysis of its narrative, and of the remarks of several
critics, has shown that he managed to express those thoughts quite successfully in
Inside Out.
I have also tried to illustrate several kinds of reasons that can be given for
claims about what a film thinks about certain issues (assuming it says what it
thinks). Expert consultants explained the psychological science behind the film.
Widespread agreement among the critics about what it means confirmed the
clarity of the statements that Inside Out makes. The reevaluation of Sadness that
occurs in the course of the narrative embraces this much maligned emotion, and

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depicts it as taking its rightful place in the healthy development of a young girl.
The director’s stated intentions are clearly realized, as critical consensus confirms.
Taken together, all of these sources provide convincing evidence for claiming that
this is indeed what the film “thinks”.

Dan Shaw

Notes

1 A.O. Scott’s review of Inside Out for The New York Times June 18, 2015, available here http://
www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/movies/review-pixars-inside-out-finds-the-joy-in-sadness-and-
vice-versa.html?_r=0, accessed 7/13/2015
2 Brock Bastian, “Is the promotion of happiness making us sad?” on the New Philosopher website,
April 29, 2013, available here http://www.newphilosopher.com/articles/is-the-promotion-of-
happiness-making-us-sad/#sthash.kgnqpNaH.dpuf accessed 7/13/2015.
3 synopsis posted by Brian Stewart, to be found here http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2096673 /
synopsis? ref=ttpl_ql_3 accessed 7/13/2015
4 Caroline Moss, for the Business Insider website, July 1, 2015 available here http://www.
businessinsider. com/inside-out-feeling-joy-and-sadness-2015-7 Accessed 7/13/2015
5 see, for example, Antonia Peacocke and Jackson Kernion, “Two philosophers explain what
Inside Out gets wrong about the mind” on the Vox website, posted 6/25/2015 here http://www.
vox.com/2015/6/25/8840945/inside-out-mind-memory Accessed 7/14/2015
6 J. Wesley Judd, “A Conversation with the Psychologist Behind ‘Inside Out’ “ posted on the
Pacific Standard website Jul. 5, 2015, available here http://www.psmag.com/books-and-
culture/a-conversation-with-psychologist-behind-inside-out Accessed 7/14/2015
7 “The Science of Inside Out” in The New York Times July 3, 2015 available here http://www.
nytimes.com/ 2015/07/05/opinion/sunday/the-science-of-inside-out.html Accessed 7/14/2015.
8 Nick Schager’s review of Inside Out for The Daily Beast, 6/20/15, available here http://www.
thedailybeast. com/articles/2015/06/20/inside-out-pixar-s-latest-masterpiece-is-its-most-
profound-movie-yet.html Accessed 7/13/2015
9 Frampton was, of course, primarily concerned with the question of whether a film can mean
something more (or different) from what its director intended, an issue that does not concern me
here. Although I agree with Frampton that it can, I don’t think an adequate account of what that
means requires such a radical assumption. Happily, I have the luxury of drawing on the stated
intentions, and thoughts, of the director and his consultants to justify my claims about what the
film is saying, which is precisely what its makers intended.
10 Don Kaye, interview with Pete Docter for the Screen Rant website posted 6/19/2015 here http://
screenrant. com/inside-out-pete-docter-interview/ Accessed 7/14/2015

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