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Inside Out follows the story of Riley, an 11-year-old hockey player, and her family’s move to San Francisco from the Midwest. Her emotions – Sadness, Joy, Anger, Fear, and Disgust – that reside in her head ( aka Headquarters) – attempt to guide her through this stressful change but are faced with unexpected challenges when Joy and Sadness get stuck in Long Term Memory and the rest of the emotions are left in charge.

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Themes: Lessons Animation Taught Us: Inside Out | CinemaWins

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When Riley’s dad starts a new job in San Francisco, her family suddenly packs up their life in the Midwest to move to a new state, and she is forced to leave behind her friends and the hockey team that she plays on. She’s initially optimistic about the move – thanks to Joy – but soon realizes her new life isn’t all she expected to be when her new house, San Francisco pizza, and being the new girl at school results in a rough start for her. Joy attempts to distract Riley from all these things by playing happy family memories in Headquarters, but Sadness begins to make a habit of tainting these memories with nostalgia that ultimately consumes Riley in a perpetual cloud of sadness that just makes her miss home. This leads to Sadness making a blue core memory  – which Joy tries to get rid of – but in doing so, both Sadness and Joy and all of Riley’s core memories get stuck in the recall tube and sent to long term memory, where they meet Bing Bong, Riley’s imaginary friend from her childhood. This effectively cuts Riley off from all the Islands of Personality that make her who she is. While Joy and Sadness go through various parts of Riley’s mind to try and return to headquarters, Fear, Disgust, and Anger are left to guide Riley’s emotions. This causes her relationship with her parents to become strained and when Anger plants an idea in her head to go back to Minnesota, she steals her mom’s credit card to buy a bus ticket with the plan to run away. At this point Riley appears to be emotionless. This lying causes Honesty Island to fall, derails the Train of Thought – that Joy, Sadness, and Bing Bong were using to get to Headquarters – and destroys long term memory, putting Joy and Bing Bong in the memory dump with no way out. In the Memory Dump, Joy realizes that memories aren’t static (can be happy and sad at the same time) and uses the power of imagination to fuel Bing Bong’s wagon, which gets her out of the Dump but leaves Bing Bong behind to be forgotten. Joy eventually relocates Sadness and gets both of them back to Headquarters just in time to reconnect with her core memories/emotions. Riley then gets off the bus, returns home, and opens up to her parents about how she’s been feeling.

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Lessons Animation Taught Us: Inside Out | CinemaWins

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Jean Piaget was a Swiss researcher and psychologist – living from 1896 to 1980 –

who’s theory about childhood development has long since dominated our understanding of how children think about and comprehend the world around them. Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development asserts that children develop in 4 distinct stages as opposed to developing in a gradual or continuous sense. He believed that kids of similar age have a certain way of thinking for several years and then quickly shift to a new way of thinking, each stage being biologically determined with minimal influence from their environment/life experiences.

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Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

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Piaget’s theory was challenged by Vygotsky’s, which argued that social interaction was a driving force in cognitive development, as opposed to it being a less prominent influence compared to biology. Instead, Vygotsky believed that interaction with adults was was what fostered change in child’s thought process

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Riley only reaches age 11 in the first Inside Out movie, so we only see her go through Sensorimotor, Preoperational, and Concrete Operational Stages.

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As a toddler, Riley has learned how to walk, become aware of objects outside of her own body (eg. toys in the wagon and noticing the cord she steps over), and has developed preferences for foods based on taste/smell.

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Riley’s imagination starts to form when she pretends that the floor is lava as she jumps from couch to couch and creates Bing Bong, an imaginary friend. As mentioned in the video, when she draws Bing Bong on the wall, she doesn’t draw him to scale but rather draws him as a symbol of happiness and friendship.

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Riley learns how to ice skate and develops her love for hockey, a game which requires a higher level of understanding and logic. To score a goal, she has to reason to and construct a plan to outmaneuver players while sticking to a set of rules.

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Playing with various objects around the house gave Riley an awareness of things outside of herself and allowed her to develop cause and effect relationships. For example, running over the cord on the floor instead of stepping over it might’ve caused her to fall.

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Engaging in a cooperative version of play helped Riley learn how to share and collaborate. Communicating with Meg also would’ve exercised her verbal skills and her ability to express ideas through language.

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Her first goal in hockey fueled her passion for hockey, which is a cultural norm in Minnesota and a sport that enhanced her ability to use logic in approaching problems and challenges.

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Moving to a new state challenged Riley’s ability to regulate her emotions and her understanding of her relationship with her parents. She had to figure out how to balance the happiness and sadness that comes with nostalgia and how to open up to her parents emotionally instead of shutting them out or resorting to anger.

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Explaining Riley's Development and Experiences

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Explaining Riley's Development and Experiences

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The theory explained Riley’s development well in the sense that it captured the abruptness of maturity that the movie presents. We don’t see Riley gradually grow into her 11-year-old self, but rather we see her at different stages of life and the core memories that she’s made at those ages.

While the theory does a good job of capturing this aspect of the character, it doesn’t necessarily incorporate the why of Riley’s decisions and thought process, but simply supports the fact that she’s at an age where she is inherently able to make such decisions. For example, Riley being 11 and in the concrete operational stage explains why she is able to perceive that the “cool kids” at school think she’s weird for crying in class, but it doesn’t emphasize how this experience might affect her in the formal operational stage.

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I’d say the theory is a good fit, because, again, her development is presented in distinct stages. At the end of the movie, the panel that the emotions in her head use to guide/influence her behavior is suddenly bigger, as opposed to the panel gradually increasing in size throughout her time as an 11-year-old.

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I’d say that my character’s identity is a sort of non-factor when it comes to this theory because it’s strongly based in biological ideas as opposed to those based in life experiences. Piaget’s theory is more universal in nature, asserting that childhood development is a universal process for kids in the same age group.

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Besides relating to stage vs continuous development, Riley’s character also addresses temperament in the sense that her temperament changes with the loss of Sadness and Joy. While Riley still had moments where she got upset while Sadness and Joy were at headquarters, she generally speaking had an easy temperament because Joy always took charge. This seen in the fact that when she moved, she initially tried to view everything in a light of optimism (eg. Impromptu hockey game with her parents when the moving truck was late and envisioning how she could make her room better when it was empty). However, once they were gone and Anger took charge, her temperament became more difficult in the sense that she was prone to escalating negative situations (eg. picking a fight with her parents at the dinner table and running away) (Pomerantz p. 916-919).

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Pixar Inside Out   A Family Dinner Scene