Favorite Disney Moment

            I have not been posting nearly enough this year and I want to steer back from that.  To that end I have found a 30-day blog challenge and fluffed it out to 31 entries (since December has 31 days).  I have done a 30-day challenge before for movies, though that one was poorly executed (I started it in the middle of a month, at one point I posted 2 entries on one day, it is a mess).  I did another one just this year in August on Video Games, that one was better, go read it after this one, all of it.  Or don’t, no pressure.

            Today is day 21 and the topic is “Favorite Overall Moment”.

Let’s talk again about a movie I already sang some praise for, “Inside Out”.  In this movie we follow the emotions of a young girl, Riley who has just moved with her family to the strange and alien lands of San Francisco.  Her emotions are personified by 5 colorful characters, two of which, Joy and Sadness, are lost in the young girl’s mind navigating her memories and imagination trying to restore “core memories” to the girl’s mind so that they can help guide her actions, without them Riley is adrift and experiencing emotional numbness.

 

Did I already use this image?  I don't care.

But what caused Joy and Sadness to get lost in Riley’s mind near the start of the movie?  Joy was the leader of the emotions, and she had been working to make sure the core memories that formed Riley’s most basic personality were all happy memories, up till this point there were 5 having to do with sportsmanship, family, friendship, etc.  When Riley is about to form a new memory based around being humiliated by breaking down crying at her new school, a core memory of sadness, Joy tries to stop that memory from taking hold and all the core memories get lost in a mental disposal system.

When trying to recover the memories Joy and Sadness begin to interact more and Joy comes to understand what the role of Sadness is.  There are highs and lows in life, and fighting to stay happy ALL THE TIME and only allowing happy thoughts and memories to occupy you mind and define you is NOT HEALTHY.  A person who does that become unable to deal with hard decisions or tragedies.  Emotions are complex and bleed into one another in ways we do not understand—this is kind of literal as the human mind is very much a mystery to humanity.

Realizing Emotional complexity in “Inside Out” is my favorite moment in all of Disney.  It is literalizing something that is so hard to teach and explain to people, I would go so far as to say this movie is a must watch just for this lesson.

 

We all contain multitudes.

            Share your own thoughts on this in the comments.  I know I am not the only person out there who is nostalgic for Disney products, and I am sure many people disagree with my selection for today’s entry. 

I picked Disney stuff just because I knew there was so much of it to talk about and it lends itself to discussion in the comments.  So please, tell me how my opinion about cartoon movies is biased and how your opinion on cartoon movies is objectively right.

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