'Inside Out'

The movie that made me marvel at the architecture and made me curious about the world created in the film is 'Inside Out'.

'Inside Out' is a unique film that takes place mostly inside the mind of an eleven-year-old girl. The story finds Riley uprooted as her family moves from the Midwest to San Francisco. As she navigates her new city, Riley must adjust to big changes at home and school, a big emotional challenge for a person of any age, let alone an inexperienced youngster. 'Inside Out' is all about Riley, specifically her emotions. She's something of a supporting character in her own story, as the film goes inside her head to follow her five competing primary emotions as the jockey for dominance and respond to new stimuli and events from the outside.

Within her mind's Headquarters, there exist five personifications of her basic emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. The emotions influence Riley's actions via a control console.

The setting of this movie awe inspiring to me is the five personality islands. The islands float above the abyss of the Memory Dump and are connected by a long rod to Headquarters. Before she turned 11, Riley formed five Islands of Personality: Family Island, Honesty Island, Hockey Island, Friendship Island and Goofball Island. The idea of personality islands brought about an interesting aspect of ourselves. They represent as our dream and hope since we are small. The frequency of certain emotions felt at the turning points in our lives shape us into who we are. We lose some of the personality traits we use to have and we gain some others in return.

Besides that, Sadness, the secondary character, has inspired me throughout this movie. Joy was adamant throughout the film to isolate Sadness so that Riley can stay happy. Sadly, we cannot be happy forever. As paradoxical as this sounds, the struggle that Joy had and why she couldn’t comprehend the role of Sadness touches close to my heart. Because we know we will never win this fight for happiness yet we still do fight for it. We’re unable to accept negativity as it is and we label negativity as it is, without giving a thought of how this could turn around and empower us instead. We’re fighting for happiness by fighting against sadness when actually these emotions are not at war at all. Perhaps the day that you learn to shed tears of joy is the day you will realize that happiness and sadness are not contradictory emotions at all.

“All right everyone, fresh start! We're gonna have a good day, which will turn into a good week, which will turn into a good year, which will turn into a good life!” — Joy

In this line from the movie, Joy thinks that a good life is one that never experiences hardship, but her short-sightedness keeps her from realizing the benefit of other emotions, such as fear, disgust or anger.

“Crying helps me slow down and obsess over the weight of life's problems.” — Sadness

The film's psychologists said they took issue with sadness's portrayal because inside our minds, sadness is not a sluggish nuisance, but rather a physiological response that signals the body to respond (we cry). Though Sadness delivers this line as comic relief, she accurately describes what happens when we experience profound loss. We slow down, we process and we cry.

"The real star of the film is sadness, for Inside Out is a film about loss and what people gain when guided by feelings of sadness," the psychologists Eckman and Keltner write.

The most touching part of the movie for me is the loss of Bing Bong, the imaginary friend of Riley, sacrificing himself so that joy can make it out of the pit of loss memories. What Bing Bong represents isn’t just an imaginary friend you might have when you were young, he represents all the memories that you have collected down the years. In order to save the ones you want, you have to let the others go. It is a hard truth but one can never remember everything. It is a bittersweet experience but you have to sacrifice certain memories so that you can collect more of them. Bing Bong also faded in this scene and this telling moment brought out another hard truth: there are memories in our lives that we can never recall, no matter how hard we try to. They are what they are and life’s like this, once you choose to discard some things in your life, there is a chance that you will never get them back should you ever want to.

From this movie, I have learnt to know that we have to experience different kind of situations with different emotions to create a meaningful and wonderful life. We know that a good life is not a perfect life absent of emotion. Just like in real life, we have to be sad at times, and it’s okay. Sadness is not a bad thing. When we face difficulties, be gentle with yourself, take a break, reflect, and see what the problem could be. Don’t let your problems control you. We should never give up easily even though there are many obstacles in our life. We should accept it and challenge it so that we can be a better and stronger person. The film also reminds us that family and friends are some of the most important parts of life, and good relationships are essential to our happiness. In addition, to things that can actually be good for us, this can include the emotions Fear, Anger, Disgust, and eventually, Sadness. Each one has a purpose to fulfill, such as Fear protecting us from dangerous and scary things, and Anger making things fair. Without these emotions, we won’t be able to function properly.