Inside Out Movie Analysis

The 2015 Disney-Pixar movie Inside Out depicts the functions of an eleven year-old girl’s brain by personifying five prominent human emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust. In the movie, the main character, Riley, experiences significant change when her family moves across the country and she begins to adapt to her new life in San Francisco. The five emotions have resided in Riley’s brain since her birth and control her emotional state by using a control panel. The Disney film Inside Out uses a variety of structural, ontological, and orientational metaphors to illustrate abstract neuroscientific concepts, both psychological and physiological, including emotion, the structure of the human brain, thoughts, memories, and personality.

The metaphor humans are machines is an overlying concept in the movie. The five emotions in Riley’s head essentially control her thoughts, decisions, and overall personality by using a control panel in her brain. The brain is a control panel and, consequently, humans are machines metaphors help children understand the basics of brain function and the significance of the brain for control over one’s own body, as well as his or her decision making processes and identity. A typical metaphor used when describing the mind is the mind is a container/storage unit (Kovecses). In Inside Out, Riley’s mind is comparable to a storage unit that houses not only her personified emotions, but her memories, dreams, and potential decisions. Although metaphors customarily emphasize similarities between two unlike entities to interpret and comprehend abstract concepts, the writers of Inside Out made a deviation from this practice by employing the metaphor subconsciousness is a dark abyss. In the movie, Joy and Sadness explore Riley’s subconsciousness by descending into an eerie, cave-like abyss. One’s subconsciousness and an abyss have mappings of

The target audience of Inside Out, however, is young children who are expected to have little to no knowledge on neurological anatomy or function. It has been stated by multiple researchers that for one to understand a radically new topic, metaphor must be employed to create connections between the new concept and a concept one has previously learned or experienced (Petrie). Inside Out accomplishes this by separately naming and describing different parts of Riley’s brain. It can be assumed that the prefrontal cortex is what is described as “headquarters” in the movie; this is where the majority of brain function occurs and where the five emotions reside. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for decision making, personality expression, and construction of diverse cognitive behavior and processes (Siddiqui). Long-term memory is separate from “headquarters” in the movie; everyday, memories are “shipped” via long, thin, transportation tubes that represent neurons in the brain. The long-term memory spheres are stored in large, winding cases where, if not remembered again, they fade and disappear. The neuroscientific accuracy in the film is astounding for a children’s movie. In humans, memories are transported to the hippocampus for long-term storage. Also, if neurons connected to certain memories are not active for a long period of time,