The central theme of this movie is based around a character called ‘Riley’, an 11-year old girl whose family had to move across the country to a new neighbourhood for her father's new job. The unique insight to the plot is that the viewer is introduced to a number of characters inside Riley’s head as she navigates this life-changing experience.
Each of these characters represent an emotion like anger, sadness, joy, disgust or anxiety. As the plot unfolds and Riley is struggling to adjust to her new surroundings, the emotionally representative characters in Riley’s head undergo a crisis where ‘Joy’ and ‘Sadness’ get lost in her long term memory and must find their way back to the ‘control base’ where the other emotions are located. The storyline is superbly interwoven between Riley and her parent’s experiences of inside and outside their heads. This theme allows the viewer to distinguish between and connect the relationship of inside (intrapersonal) and outside (interpersonal) communication.
This is an engaging, high quality and entertaining movie that both parents and children of all ages will enjoy. The viewer, no matter how old, will benefit from valuable insights into the art of understanding and broaching emotional issues from the inside out. The film is especially relevant for the tweenagers audience (10-13 years) since parents could engage their children in a powerful discussion afterwards about some of the concepts the movie introduces.
One of the approaches that can be used to explain quite complex emotional concepts to children is through a metaphor. This is because something that is described in a ‘once removed’ way is far less threatening and therefore more prone to understanding. The use of metaphor inherent throughout ‘Inside Out’ is fantastic.
Emotionality is something that we all struggle with. More specifically learning to put language on emotion can be a real challenge. One of the core concepts of any therapy is to facilitate a person to put words or meaning on feelings which can be a significant challenge. Once we can name a feeling we can begin to understand it, and when we understand it we can begin to deal with it.
Culturally we are moving more and more towards ‘brevity’ when it comes to language and communication. We are encouraged more and more to limit our words into the neatness of 140 character descriptions (twitter) which does not lend itself to emotionality. Emotionality can be messy and so it has to be ‘processed’ and elaborated on rather than minimised. Therefore it is really refreshing to see a movie that dedicates its complete plot line to processing and understanding emotion.
Not only does this movie demonstrate metaphors of emotion and thought, through the representation of inner ‘characters’, it goes on to explore the interaction of emotions with each other which is often a phenomena that we neglect to consider.
The co-existence of more than one emotion at one time can be confusing and can seem like something that we are reluctant or unable to describe as there is an urge to describe only the dominant emotion. It is the interaction and understanding of the ‘cause and effect’ of these multiple emotions on other behaviours that can often be a central aspect of my psychological work with children and adolescents in therapy.
I hope that families who see this movie leave the theatres with a language and a visual reference point to open up a conversation about emotions, thoughts and behaviours with each other.
