Emotion Sickness
C. R. Wiley on the Big Thing That Pixar's Inside Out Left Out
Pixar certainly has a winning formula. The movie studio seems to have found that little spot behind the collective ear that we like to have scratched. Its first 2015 release, Inside Out, follows the same inimitable story-telling recipe it served up to great applause with films such as Up, WALL-E, and Ratatouille. Pixar films are captivating—artfully done—without losing the story in the process. And let's give the studio credit for taking the high road, leaving sexual innuendo and scatological humor to its competitors.
But Inside Out is something more; it's a bit of a revelation. You see, that's precisely what the story is supposed to provide—insight into the mental workings of a prepubescent girl named Riley. But by showing us that, Pixar gives us more than a peek inside the mind of an eleven-year-old; it also reveals what it thinks of you and me—the viewing public. Pixar has given us its doctrine of man.
Inside Out from the Outside
On the surface, Riley's story is pretty straightforward. She is an only child, and at the beginning of the story she lives in Minnesota with her mother and father. She loves her parents, her friends, and hockey. But her idyll comes to an end when her father enters a partnership to establish a business in San Francisco. Riley is then plopped down into a comfortless world: her friends are now a thousand miles away; her father is preoccupied with the demands of his new job, and their new house is a dilapidated walkup located on a narrow and cheerless back street. And to make matters worse, the moving van containing all of her favorite things has somehow been misrouted to Texas and will be delayed for a week. Riley is forced to sleep on the floor in a dirty attic room. After breaking down in tears on her first day of school, she decides to run away to Minnesota. She steals her mother's credit card and sneaks off to the bus station. After the bus pulls out of the station, Riley comes to her senses and gets off the bus just before it pulls onto the highway going out of town. She goes home and is received with gladness by her worried parents. There is a group hug and the story ends happily.
But all of that is just the occasion for the real story. That drama unfolds inside Riley's head.
Inside Out from the Inside
When we enter Riley's mind, we step into a high-tech amusement park crossed with a video library. Everything is coordinated from a control room (the actual name for it in the film). This room resembles the bridge of the starship Enterprise. It has a large control panel and even a wall-sized video monitor.
The video library is for Riley's memories. Her experiences are recorded on what appear to be crystal balls—resembling the one from the castle of the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. These are generated in the tens of thousands and must be sorted out in order of importance. The most important become the "core memories" that constitute Riley's personality. These get stored in a special compartment and, through an unexplained process, they generate the various "theme islands" of Riley's amusement-park mind. These include: Family-Island, Honesty-Island, Friendship-Island, Hockey-Island, and Goofball-Island. Less important memories go to a vast library known as Long-Term Memory. Since even its capacious shelves are finite, they must be cleared out periodically to make room for new memories. When this happens, the old memories are thrown into a bleak valley known as Memory Dump, where they disintegrate into nothing.
There is more to the theme park than this; there are also back lots, infrastructure, and personnel to keep it all running. And everything connects via a rail line known as The Train of Thought. It's all very cleverly and artfully rendered, and populated by sundry creatures that personify Riley's fantasies or fears. When it comes to fantasies, there is her old imaginary friend Bing-Bong, and a one-dimensional, pop-culture-generated, imaginary boyfriend whose vocabulary is limited to the phrase, "I would die for Riley!" When it comes to fears, there is a giant birthday clown that lives as a nightmare. All these characters play important roles in saving Riley from herself as the story is told.
But for all its color and charm, a little reflection can't help but reveal that Riley's mind is entirely artificial. Nothing truly living actually resides there—nary a tree, nor a blade of grass, not even a dog.
C. R. Wiley is a pastor living in the Pacific Northwest. He is the author of The Household and the War for the Cosmos and In the House of Tom Bombadil. He is also a co-host of The Theology Pugcast. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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