A Quest for Joy

I finally got around to watching “Inside Out” the other day. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a Disney/Pixar animated movie that personifies the emotions within one particular girl and how they affect (rule?) her life. It is quite clever and very amusing.

Two things about this movie really stuck out for me. The first is that Joy was the only positive emotion within the “cast.” The others consisted of Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust. It was always Joy’s job to counter the others, to hold them back, to negotiate with them. It does seem that negatives easily outweigh or outnumber positives in our lives. It is our constant battle – if we choose to take it on – to put on a happy face.

As a Christian, I was particularly fascinated that the producers of “Inside Out” chose Joy and not Happiness for the name and attributes of the character. And I think they actually presented a very Christian perspective in the film – whether they intended to or not. I have learned that happiness is conditional: it depends on the circumstances. Joy does not. One can remain joyful in the most depressing or fearful situations. The character Joy struggles to do just that through the movie.

The other major observation I had was how the plot of “Inside Out” paralleled classic literature: someone starts out happy, loses something, then goes on an adventure to recover that something, encountering interesting/scary characters who may help or hinder the quest. In the study of literature, in fact, it is called The Quest, one of what are considered the 7 basic plotlines. The “something” is almost unimportant, what Hitchcock would call a MacGuffin. “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Odyssey,” and “The Lord of the Rings” are examples of quest tales.

I don’t usually do movie reviews in this blog, but this one definitely caught my attention. Within the promising structure of a classic adventure, “Inside Out” provides an amusing glimpse into the inner world of our emotions and our memories.