ABSTRACT
In Pete Docter’s brilliant and neuro-scientifically informed visualization ofthe emotions that govern humans and other animals, Pixar Animation’s Inside Out (2015), the affective life – and therefore the life – of Riley, the elevenyear-old protagonist, is dominated by five key emotions: joy, sadness, fear, disgust and anger. In Docter’s conception, it is the interactions between these five primary emotions in the punningly-named ‘headquarters’ (effectively Riley’s consciousness) that produce the almost limitless variety of feelings that go to make up the young girl’s memories and personality as well as controlling her actions. It is like the interactions between the three primary colours that go to make up all the other colours in the world – indeed, in Inside Out, the five anthropomorphized emotions have their own colours and Riley’s vast memory-bank is made up of an endless series of multiply-coloured spheres. The trauma of moving from Minnesota to San Francisco causes Joy and Sadness to get lost and for a seriously dangerous emotional imbalance to take over: Fear, Disgust and Anger are left in sole charge. The central idea of this remarkable movie is that each of your feelings – even the lonely, insecure and rather pathetic Sadness – is necessary for a viable emotional life.
