How Movie’s Message Shapes Our Children Today

In spite of its cute animated appearance and the fact that most of the audiences are children, some of my friends argue that Inside Out is not movie rated for children. One of them has told me that the movie may even “slap” children waking them up to realize that life is full of sadness, not only wonderful days.

In the movie, Joy keeps trying to make Riley happy everyday, allowing her to only have good memories and cheerful personality. The experiences Riley gets through everyday are represented in memory balls. Little Riley mostly has yellow, the color of Joy, memory balls everyday because Joy rarely lets other emotions take control over Riley.

It is until Riley is 11 and her family must move to San Francisco due to her father’s job, everything changes. No matter how much Joy tries to bring up good past memories to her, one way or another keeps leading Riley to other emotions like Disgust, Fear, and Anger. The unexpected peak of this tragedy is when Sadness keeps touching various memory balls and the core of memory when Riley is at new school for the first time, and she eventually cries in the middle of her introduction as she misses her good times in Minnesota.

The personality islands eventually crumble down one after another. Friendship that Riley has in Minnesota, the Hockey she loves, the honesty she upholds, and her bonds to her parents, they all fall apart. The emotion control suddenly loses its function when Riley becomes an empty person and cannot feel anything.

Joy eventually realizes that trying to keep other emotions away from Riley, especially Sadness that Joy almost gets rid away, is just wrong. Joy finally understands that life cannot only consist of good times, but also bad times. And when bad times arrive, it is perfectly fine for Riley to be sad, and sometimes allowing the sadness to surface is the way how we reach other people, giving them chance to understand and help us. Sometimes even happiness of having people surround and love us needs to start from pain.

A new kind of ball suddenly is born; it is a combination between Joy and Sadness, colored in Blue and Yellow. Perhaps like Kahlil Gibran proposes in The Prophet, happiness and grief are actually inseparable. “Your Joy is your sorrow unmasked…. The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

All of the scenes showing Joy and Sadness’ adventure are entirely just Riley’s afterimage of her mental condition, the projection of her mind embodied in cutesy figures that she wants only Joy that rules over her life, which is impossible. In the post-credits it is shown that Riley is not the only one, other people also have this kind of battle on their own.

Some of my friends cried as they watched Inside Out. Some say that they reflected their lives on the movie, how they could feel the misery and understand when life was turned upside down in no time and it’s just difficult to get through the rain. In the process, they might lose themselves just like Riley.

Before, Disney has released other movies like Frozen and Maleficent that give message of women empowerment. In those movies, the princesses are depicted to find true love in other forms than romance with men, but siblinghood and mother’s love. As if it tries to tell the girls out there that they don’t need prince charming to feel loved and be happy. Girls can be independent on their own. What a feminist movement.

With all these new kinds of child’s stories, I wonder what kind of new adult generation the children today will be in the future.

As the 1990’s generation, my childhood was filled with fairy tales about happily ever after between weak princess and the prince charming who saved her. Everything was falsely dreamy that even parents and teachers in school told us to randomly be anything we wanted to be in our future without trying to pay attention at what we're good at, which later would only be opposed by them saying we’re not being realistic.

It used to be implicitly compulsory for women to be weak, and used to be wrong for men to cry or get depressed over problems. Womanhood was about helplessness, and manhood was about to be emotionless and rude.

However, perhaps children born in 2010 and after have different era of childhood. Their fairy tales tell them to be independent and hardworking, not waiting for miracle so that life would be easy. The cartoons teach them the epiphany of embracing both joy and sorrow, something I never knew until High School. The love is no longer about happily ever after in a castle with flowery garden, but the precious experiences shared with people around us.

One may conclude that Inside Out and other similar movies have crushed the dreams of children, but I think oppositely; they bring new dreams to children. They give a hope of better future wherein women can have more self-esteem and equal position to men. It is a brighter era of tolerance and understanding that life is not always nice, thus we need to work hand in hand and offer help to whoever is having hard times.

Our world today is already full ego. Corruption and violence happen everywhere. Everything is always about money and forcefully imposing one’s ideology to other people. Discrimination against women and minority is seen as normal tradition. Bullying is very common in society.

The children we have today, however, may have the chance to fix it. With all these novel lessons incepted to their subconscious mind, they may be the wiser people than we are today. I dream of the day when I’m old and I can see the new adults later will respect each other in equal, when there is no more bullying and violence toward minority and marginalized people but instead we lend them our hands in their times of sadness.

image: www.playbuzz.com