"Inside Out" provides a language for therapy

Melena Ryzik, How ‘Inside Out’ and Its Sequel Changed Therapy, NYTimes, Aug. 7, 2024. Opening paragraphs of the article:

In 2012, when Olivia Carter was just starting out as a school counselor, she employed all sorts of strategies to help her elementary-age students understand and communicate their feelings — drawing, charades, color association, role playing. After 2015, though, starting those conversations became a lot easier, she said. It took just one question: “Who has seen the movie ‘Inside Out’?”

That Pixar hit, about core emotions like joy and sadness, and this summer’s blockbuster sequel, which focuses on anxiety, have been embraced by educators, counselors, therapists and caregivers as an unparalleled tool to help people understand themselves. The story of the moods steering the “control panel” in the head of a girl named Riley has been transformational, many experts said, in day-to-day treatment, in schools and even at home, where the films have given parents a new perspective on how to manage the turmoil of growing up.

“As therapeutic practice, it has become a go-to,” said David A. Langer, president of the American Board of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. In his household, too: “I have 9-year-old twins — we speak about it regularly,” said Langer, who’s also a professor of psychology at Suffolk University. “Inside Out” finger puppets were in frequent rotation when his children were younger, a playful way to examine the family dynamic. “The art of ‘Inside Out’ is explicitly helping us understand our internal worlds,” Langer said.

And it’s not just schoolchildren that it applies to. “I’ve been stealing lines from the movie and quoting them to adults, not telling them that I’m quoting,” said Regine Galanti, a psychologist and author in private practice on Long Island, speaking of the new film.

Anxiety:

And the new movie’s focus on anxiety, which has reached crisis proportions among adolescents, normalizes experiences that for young people could seem isolating or overwhelming, and makes them relatable.

“Almost every day there’s a student who’s struggling or having a panic attack,” Carter said. “I could see this being something that I lean on pretty heavily for a long time.”

Later:

“INSIDE OUT” ARRIVED at a moment when educators and caregivers were paying more attention to what’s known as social-emotional learning, prioritizing connection and communication skills, and recognizing, not tamping down, children’s sensibilities as part of their self-regulation. [...]

Acknowledging feelings “is like a magical thing,” Damour said. “If a person says, ‘I feel sad,’ they suddenly feel less sad.”

That “Inside Out” helps families have those conversations together amplifies one of its messages, to embrace our personalities in all their shades and shadows.

There's much more at the link.

Michael Barrier and Andrew Osmond on Inside Out

Michael Barrier:

Still, I couldn't get past the film's governing conceit, that the personified emotions inside eleven-year-old Riley's head were somehow distinct from Riley herself. Who, or what, is Riley, if the emotions governing her life are not central to her being? To descend to a lower metaphysical plane, or maybe just call the story's craftsmanship into question, it seems to me that Inside Out's personified emotions, to be credible as such, would have to be one-dimensional—that is, nothing but fearful or angry or whatever—whereas most of them are not. Joy is so much more than joyful, especially as voiced by Amy Poehler, that she's really the story's protagonist, with a much broader emotional range than Riley herself. The girl is little more than a puppet, a sort of latterday Pinocchio, perhaps, if I might invoke another problematic Disney feature.

Andrew Osmond:

This child, Riley, is portrayed unusually for a Hollywood cartoon, but much less so for anime. Inside Out is about the end of her childhood, her moving towards adolescence, and the uncertainty and anger she feels. To make this less abstract, the script ties this in with Riley’s parents moving from Minnesota to San Francisco (Pixar’s real-life home); Riley’s troubles fitting in; and her realisation that a treasured part of her life is over and gone forever. In her head, this plays through the shifting relationship between Riley’s main emotions, Joy and Sadness.

Anime is different; it prefers to depict troubled kids at their own level. For many fans, anime is practically defined by angsty, angry teenage boys. In Akira, Tetsuo’s incontinent mental and physical changes were animated as a monster in an Olympic stadium. He was followed by Shinji in Evangelion, Light in Death Note, Eren in Attack on Titan and many more. The boy Ame in Wolf Children is interesting; he’s the reverse of Riley, sad in childhood, only finding joy as he grows up, though he still breaks his mother’s heart.

But closer to Riley, there are girls like Chihiro in Spirited Away, Momo in A Letter to Momo and Anna in Ghibli’s upcoming When Marnie was There. As I discuss elsewhere on this blog, these three girls – all about Riley’s age – share an animation director, Masashi Ando, who specialises in “murky, painful” emotions. Chihiro, Momo and Anna also spend much of their respective films being unhappy, more than a Hollywood toon could allow. Inside Out sidesteps the problem by telling most of its story through the aggressively cheerful Joy, not the increasingly mopey Riley.

There's much more there, including a mention of Cranium Command, a now defunct attraction from Walt Disney World, which depicted the inside of a boy's mind and included animation by a young Pete Docter.

Last, a comment I sent to Barrier:

What I'm wondering is why this film got such extreme praise as it it. I understand there's something of a "Pixar can do no wrong" vibe in some quarters, but the notion that this presages a new era in animation, animation directed at adults no less, seems extreme even for that. Something else is going on, though I don't quite know what.

Maybe it's that the film's main 'bug' has been misconstrued as a 'feature'. This is because Riley's inner gnomes outclass Riley herself thereby forcing you to do a bit of thinking to keep things together. That thinking is being reconceived as adultness rather than as an aesthetic flaw.

Earlier posts about Inside Out:

• Pixar’s Inside Out is Confused, Alas, But who Knows what the Future May Bring
• Inside Out: I don't get it

Inside Out: I don't get it

I saw Pixar's Inside Out as soon as it opened. Why? Because I love animation, I think highly of Pixar at its best, and the film was getting mad hype. I was under-whelmed. The film seemed confused and unfocused. So I went to see it again a week later, and it got better. Maybe I over-reacted the first time. Also, I saw it in 3D this time, but I don't think that had much to do with it. The story's the story regardless of 2D or 3D.

Still, I keep hearing that this is an apocalyptic sea-change in cinematic experience. David Edelstein, for example, opens his review like this:

A little over five years ago, Pixar writer-director Pete Docter (Up) tried to imagine how the world looked through the eyes of his sad 11-year-old daughter, and the movie he was moved to conceive, Inside Out, will likely help sad girls and boys and the grown-ups they become for as long as there are movies. Set largely inside the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley, this teeming, tear-duct-draining, exhaustingly inventive, surreal animated comedy is going to be a new pop-culture touchstone. In all kinds of ways it’s a mind-opener.

Really? "Exhaustingly inventive"?  Inventive, yes, but not that inventive, not exhaustingly, or exuberantly, or everlastingly, nor even extremely-to-the-max-with-sprinkles inventive. A "pop-culture touchstone"?A touchstone of just what exactly? A "mind-opener"?

Disney's Fantasia was all those things, though that wasn't recognized at the time. It took decades for that film to break-even on its investment. The film had to create its own audience through patient repetition. Disney showed its segments on his TV show, a schools showed the Rites of Spring sequence at morning assemblies: I remember it myself from my grade-school years in the 50s. In a way, the fact that people didn't get it when it came out is a sign of how inventive it really was.

 Inside Out is no Fantasia. What seems to grab people is the basic conceit – the personification of motives within a person's mind and shifting the burden of action to their interaction. That's what's seen as revelatory; Edelstein again:

Having been sucked up a chute and propelled to the far end of Riley’s mindscape, the fundamentally at-odds Joy and Sadness must find their way back to headquarters before everything really goes to hell. The road is anything but straight. The obstacles are riotous. Docter and his Pixar team have packed the film with gags — visual, verbal, broad, glancing — and I can’t think of one that doesn’t have psychological, philosophical, cultural, or just fascinating architectural underpinnings. The Long Term Memory facility was apparently inspired by a Jelly Belly candy factory and an egg-processing plant, and what its unromantic custodians choose to purge and what to keep shall not be revealed here. Dreams are scripted and shot in a mini Hollywood studio (not called DreamWorks, alas) near the giddy, freewheeling Imagination Land and the Sub­conscious, where dreams go to become nightmares. The most surprising encounter is with a friendly, dopey clown called Bing Bong (Richard Kind), who was once Riley’s imaginary friend. Happy as he is, Bing Bong carries a trace of the melancholy of Toy Story’s toys. He was once a major part of Riley’s inner world and loves her still. But he has no place in the mind of an evolving 11-year-old.

Well, yes, interesting and inventive. But it's an old ploy, not used much these days, but still, old. Maybe people just aren't used to thinking about the mind and Inside Out allows them to do it without, you know, thinking. 

Pixar’s Inside Out is Confused, Alas, But who Knows what the Future May Bring

A new Pixar film is an event, like it or not. Some are better (e.g. Ratatouille) than others. Advance word suggested Inside Out was one of the better ones, the best in the past few years. Alas, I fear it’s no more than middling Pixar, though there’s promise here.

The plot is simple: Family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco. Young daughter, Riley, age 11, is upset – where are my friends! – depressed, and tries to run away. But doesn’t. The end.

Common enough. But hardly the stuff of a feature-length film. There is, however, more to Inside Out than the bare bones story. The conceit of this film is an old convention, sometimes known as psychomachia, in which a person’s mind is allegorized as the interaction between competing agents. You’ve seen it in cartoons before – a devil will appear over one shoulder of a character and an angel over the other shoulder. Pinocchio’s conscience, Jiminy Cricket, and Dumbo’s friend and motivational coach, Timothy Mouse, are in this tradition. So is Remy’s Gasteau from Ratatouille, which I’ve discussed in Psychomachia Modern, with a Digression into Shakespeare.

So, most of Inside Out’s action takes place in Riley’s mind, which is peopled with Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, Anger, and Bing-Bong, an imaginary friend from childhood. Each is characterized by a different dominant color and a different shape. While Fear, Anger, and Disgust remain at the control center of Riley’s mind, Joy and Sadness go on a journey into the unconscious to retrieve a lost memory. In this they’re helped by Bing-Bong, who leads them in an effort to recover an imaginary rocket-wagon. There’s danger, of course; they get lost and get into trouble. But things work out in the end.

On the one hand, this is wonderful. This is what animation is for, to go where live action cannot go. Pixar takes advantage of the freedom animation affords and steps away from the annoying photorealism all too common in CGI animation as it has evolved. We need more of this, lots more.

But it doesn’t quite work – though I note that when I saw the film the audience did break out in applause at the end. One problem is that the merely mental characters, the agents of Riley’s mind – Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger – seemed too much like “real” characters. They seem to have motivations and desires of their own and each seemed richer and more inherently diverse than implied by the one-dimensionality of their assignments in Riley’s mind. Because the drama of these inner agents gets more screen time than Riley herself, she almost gets lost and becomes a one-dimensional puppet to a handful of bickering masters, each as interesting and compelling as she is.