Pixar: Inside Out

Inside Out is a beautiful movie that gets one thing fundamentally wrong. Pixar took the six basic emotions from psychology and dropped Surprise — the director felt it was too close to Fear. That left five: Joy lined up with Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear, as if they were equals.

Joy stands above them. It’s the main emotion, the only real one. It’s what you are born with. Everything wants to live. Look at kids, kittens, cubs — they play all the time. They still feel the Joy.

Athletes blind from birth have never seen anyone smile. Yet at the Paralympics, the winners smiled exactly like sighted athletes — the same smile where the eyes laugh too. You can’t learn it; you arrive with it.

The rest? Variations of fear. Fear disguises itself as anxiety, greed, peer pressure, social pressure. Disgust is fear of fear. Sadness is the absence of joy. Everything else Pixar put in the film is fear in different costumes. In the 2024 sequel, new characters showed up at the console: Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment and Ennui. And Anxiety took over.

Fear and joy don’t even work the same way. Fear narrows your view to a single point — that’s by design, so you see the tiger. Joy widens it: in experiments, people in a good mood take in the whole picture and come up with more options.

Still, Pixar showed millions of kids something true. The ones at the console are characters. Anger grabs the controls, the girl slams the door — and Riley is still Riley. A little figure pushed the buttons. You watch it from your seat.

The memory orbs roll out already colored — the tint comes from whoever reached the console first. Here the movie gets it right. Whatever happens, you decide how to read it. You stick the label on yourself. An event is just an event until you put your stamp on it. No reason ever justifies irritation. A motivational speaker named Jesus Christ made the same point: judge not.

These emotions are products of the earth suit — the body’s alarm system doing its job. But the movie treats them as if they belong at the controls alongside Joy. They don’t. The rest of the Inside Out crew doesn’t belong at the console. Suffering is optional. Joy is life itself.

Five years later Pixar redeemed itself. Soul is a movie about the spark itself and what you came here to do.