Essay On The Movie Inside Out

Disassembling Mental Disorders from the “Inside Out.” “Adults with any type of mental illness in the past year: 45.1 million” (APA). Mental disorders are not easy to visualize. Especially three of the most common disorders, Clinical Depression, Anxiety Disorder, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. However, the Oscar winning film, Inside Out, places an interesting perspective on mental disorders by occasionally panning back and forth from the main character’s head to the heads of the other cast. The main character, Riley, has five personified emotions in her head: Joy, Disgust, Fear, Anger, and Sadness. All five of these characters are given certain shapes and colors to go accordingly to what their emotion is. An example is that Anger is given

Inside Out gives a very strong idea of how a body could work when emotions are missing and are not able to do anything. Close to the end of the film, the remaining personas, with Anger taking lead, give Riley the idea of running away back to her hometown in Minnesota. As Riley gets on a bus to leave, the last of her “personality islands”, family island, falls leaving Riley without personality. The Control Center’s board also starts to black out, representing the fact that Riley’s emotions can’t make her feel anything. Riley was void of emotion. “Slipping into depression feels like falling down a dark bottomless shaft, wondering if and when your fall will ever be caught. And as you look back to where you fell from--which is where you know you need to get back to--you can see it receding further into the distance, the proverbial light becoming dimmer and dimmer, while the shaft into which you are falling becomes deeper, darker, and all the more enveloping” (Baker). Depression is the feeling of being the void, not even being an empty husk of a person. This means that while the control panel was blackening, ever so slowly, Riley was becoming the void. Directed by Pete Docter, Inside Out clearly is a tool that of which may be used when describing mental disorders, such as Clinical Depression, Anxiety Disorder, and PTSD. The film gives grand visual aids to what emotions may look like through the Riley’s emotions’ personas. Inside Out also allows us to visualize what happens when one emotion is controlling. Also, the movie gives us the scenario of being void of emotion. Using these ideas in the film, most mental disorders can be visualized. One can say that the film allows us to disassemble mental disorders from the “Inside