Favorite Setting in Disney

            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 14 and the topic is “Favorite Setting”.

Disney has lots of bright and colorful settings and they often feel very grounded.  I decided to go with the setting that is both totally real and supremely surreal.  My setting is a person.

“Inside Out” is the story of the young girl, Riley who moves with her parents to San Francisco from where she considers her home in the middle of nowhere.  And while the setting of San Francisco is rightly treated as a bizarre and unwelcoming place to the culture shocked Midwesterners the real setting of the movie is Riley herself.

Inside her mind her emotions are going haywire.  Joy and Sadness are lost in Riley’s library of memories and must find their way back to Riley’s mental center.  Along the way they see where dreams are produced, what happens to memories that are out of date, the deepest of fears, and how thoughts are processed down to their basic levels (I consider that part a highlight of creativity, as the reduction of complex ideas to base concepts is presented in such a visually interesting fashion).

Rarely is the imagination of Disney and Pixar presented in such a literal manner as they take people into the imaginations of someone right in their target demographic.

Inside each of us is a whole world to explore.

An additional interesting concept, the looks of the emotions.  When you look at the emotions of either of her parents, their internal emotions look consistently like the parent.  The father’s emotional figures are all decidedly male, and the mother’s emotional figures are all female.  Riley’s aren’t.  She has two male characters, Anger and Fear, and three female characters, Joy, Sadness, and Disgust.  This could be seen as a subtle allusion to how Riley has not crystallized her gender identity… Or it could just be that they wanted some variety in the voices of the characters and Lewis Black portraying Anger is a smart casting choice.

  

Not to say there are not many female comics that could have played a very funny Anger.

This writing prompt was originally, “Favorite/Prettiest Castle”.  There was no entry on setting.

            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.

 

I should note, there was one other strong competitor for this blog entry.
I will talk about them more later.

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