Joy and Sadness— Thoughts and Reflections about Pixar’s Inside Out

This is the fourth article of the series, you can find the third one here:

DISCLAIMER Everything you’re going to read is either contextually provided with the source of information or just my brain juice. In any case, remember that this analysis is just my interpretation and opinion.

Even if it’s difficult to spoil a movie from 10 years ago, it’s not impossible: if you didn’t watch the movie, you HAVE to! It’s a Pixar masterpiece. Moreover, the article ahead is full of spoilers.

Joy

Joy has yellow/orange skin and is bright — she emits light! — while other emotions have just their colour. At first, I thought it was just a character feature, Joy→ light seemed quite an obvious match to me.

But in other scenes, it is possible to see the Emotion team inside other characters, for example, Mom and Dad. Their emotions share the same appearance as Riley’s ones in terms of colours and faces, with just some personal details (hair, glasses or moustache). But Mom and Dad’s Joy is not bright.

I gave it a thought and I concluded that this should depict how, for adults, Joy is somehow less prominent (loss of innocence?).

Her behaviour is interesting. She embodies happiness, but also optimism. A true, unbeatable optimism to anything happing. At first, it may seem like a positive trait, but it is not always.

Due to her “ability” to always look at the bright side, Joy simply can’t empathise when it comes to awful situations. She (literally) can’t understand Sadness’s purpose and presence in Riley’s mind as well as she can do nothing when the imaginary friend, Bing Bong, loses hope when its rocket gets dumped.

With deeper analysis, it’s easy to tell that it’s not completely Joy’s fault, as her behaviour is affected by a particular request from Mom.

Sadness

Sadness seems to be off, misunderstood. But when the family moves to San Francisco, her behaviour seems even odder.

She couldn’t help but compulsively touch anything, from the console (affecting Riley’s feelings) to the memories.

By touching a memory, Sadness turns it into blue (sad) ones.

This is considered tragic by all other emotions.

She seems to be confused and cannot explain why she is acting like that. The reason may hide behind a particular, important scene: the first night in the new house.

Riley is experiencing bad feelings: one might say she is anxious, but her emotion and her ability to understand them are not fully developed yet, since she is a preteen girl. In her mind, many fear, anger, disgust and sadness spheres pile up.

Joy tries her best to keep up the morale in the only way she can: optimism. But nothing seems to go well. At night, Mom asks Riley to try and be happy to help relieve his father’s stress and worries.

She is asking to fake happiness!

This results in two outcomes: Joy’s and Sadness’ behaviour. Joy turns hyperactive and overcontrolling, Sadness is being repressed and confined (in the movie Joy tries to restrict her movements). She thus seems stressed and anxious, unable to stop herself from touching memories and the console, respectively resulting in turning happy memories into sad ones and making Riley feel sad.

Riley is growing up and, as a part of this evolution, she is losing innocence and facing negative or destructive emotions. She is just learning how to deal with them.

And she will learn that suppressing one in favour of a fake enhancement of another is not the way.

Sadness may seem negative, unpurposeful. Useless. It is not. It is the natural signal we launch when in need. A signal that can be received and understood only by someone capable of feeling the same.

Empathy is the ability to share the same feeling with someone else. Being happy empathising with someone is way easier than feeling sad in solidarity. That’s why Sadness can understand Bing Bong and help him/it feel better.

That’s why Mom and Dad, more mature and emotionally more intelligent, can understand Riley and help her overcome the first bad moment of her life.

Get access to my stories and those of other Medium writers for just $5 a month. With no additional cost to you, I will receive half of your payments as a commission: it’s a great way to support me!

Join my newsletter and receive regular notifications when I post.