Inside Out (2015)
- To accurately portray their role in Inside Out, Amy Poehler spent weeks conducting hands-on research and rehearsing directly with director Pete Docter.
- Despite initial studio skepticism, Inside Out went on to gross over $858,800,000 worldwide.
Inside Out is a 2015 American animated film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and directed by Pete Docter. The film takes place largely inside the mind of Riley Andersen, an 11-year-old girl who is uprooted from her Midwestern life when her father takes a new job in San Francisco. Riley's emotions โ Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust โ are personified as characters who operate a control center in her brain, managing her reactions and forming core memories that shape her personality.
When Joy and Sadness are accidentally swept away from headquarters into the vast labyrinth of Riley's long-term memory, the remaining emotions struggle to keep her functioning while Joy and Sadness must find their way back before Riley's personality collapses. Pete Docter developed the concept after observing his own daughter's personality change as she entered adolescence, and spent years consulting with psychologists and neuroscientists to ground the film's fantastical premise in real science about how emotions function. The film's central insight โ that sadness is not the enemy of happiness but rather an essential component of emotional health โ was praised by mental health professionals as a breakthrough in how children's media discusses psychological wellbeing.
Inside Out earned $857 million worldwide and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film. The film's depiction of Riley's emotional landscape, including the heartbreaking dissolution of her imaginary friend Bing Bong, moved adult audiences as powerfully as children, cementing Pixar's reputation for creating animated films with genuine emotional sophistication.
