Emotion Sickness
C. R. Wiley on the Big Thing That Pixar's Inside Out Left Out
Pixar certainly has a winning formula. The movie studio seems to have found that little spot behind the collective ear that we like to have scratched. Its first 2015 release, Inside Out, follows the same inimitable story-telling recipe it served up to great applause with films such as Up, WALL-E, and Ratatouille. Pixar films are captivating—artfully done—without losing the story in the process. And let's give the studio credit for taking the high road, leaving sexual innuendo and scatological humor to its competitors.
But Inside Out is something more; it's a bit of a revelation. You see, that's precisely what the story is supposed to provide—insight into the mental workings of a prepubescent girl named Riley. But by showing us that, Pixar gives us more than a peek inside the mind of an eleven-year-old; it also reveals what it thinks of you and me—the viewing public. Pixar has given us its doctrine of man.
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C. R. Wiley is a member of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters and has written for numerous periodicals. He is the author of The Household and the War for the Cosmos (Canon Press, 2019) and Man of the House (Wipf and Stock, 2017), as well as short fiction and the first book in a young-adult fantasy series, The Purloined Boy, which was republished by Canon Press in 2017. He is a Senior Editor of Touchstone.
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