I just got back from the movies with my family, and like many in America, we saw Pixar’s Inside Out. I’d say by now you know already that it’s a movie about emotions. As usual for Pixar, it was a strong presentation of an idea. As Ed Catmull has said in his wonderful book Creativity Inc, a “first principle” of Pixar is that the company “would let nothing—not the technology, not the merchandising possibilities—get in the way of our story. We took pride in the fact that reviewers talked mainly about the way Toy Story made them feel….”
They did it again. Many people have already posted on social media, blogs like this and movie reviews how Inside Out made them feel. Many adults commented how Pixar had gotten them again, making them cry in the movie. It doesn’t take much to see why.
Here’s how Brad Bird describes the movie from an early production discussion, probably happening back in 2012 or 2013 (it’s contained in Catmull’s book too, on p. 98). The movie, at its core, is “the conundrum [of] how to become mature, how to take on responsibility, and become reliable while at the same time preserving your childlike wonder.”
So, as I sat there and watched, I too struggled with my emotions. On the one hand, I was sitting there with my daughters, now 20, 18 and 15…with the elder two only a month away from moving away to College. On the other hand, I am soon to be 51 and feel more and more the deep life change that is now upon me calling much into question, including my own impression of my place in the world as well as my own wonderment about my memories and emotions.
Three key thoughts emerged. Let me share one with you now. It’s the easiest to express without too many fears of giving away spoilers. It’s this: the movie presents so strongly how there is so much going on in the mind, the emotions of a person that no one ever gets to see. We each interact with dozens, perhaps 100s of people every day, and each person has this swirl of emotions that impact their personality.
I wrote about one aspect of this last week, that the inner voice in our head can be misleading or negative. This is a slightly different point on that similar topic. The movie shows not only the protagonist and her parents, but other peers and her middle school teacher. Each has emotions in the mind that are a part of the mystery of the person.
My takeaway thus leads to this, perhaps deeper, principle: Everyone you interact with each day is a special, unique mystery. Treat them as such.
Or, as C.S. Lewis said better than I, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal”