Film Theory_ The Inside Out 2 Emotions Are All WRONG_
Transcript
00:00One of these emotions shouldn't be an inside-out. If you look at the science, the real-world
00:05psychology, and find the best models to fit an adult brain,
00:08yeah, this wouldn't be how it looks. And one of these emotions is getting demoted.
00:15Hello, Internet! Welcome to Film Theory, the show that asks,
00:19Do you ever look at someone and wonder what is going on inside their head?
00:22So, in a year where we've desperately needed a box-office hit,
00:25I'm not sure anyone expected Pixar to come along and be the heavy hitters with Inside Out 2.
00:30This is a studio that has struggled with all of its releases since the pandemic, but Inside Out 2,
00:35it's the fastest an animated movie has ever hit a billion dollars, and it's not slowing down.
00:40Also, can I ask, is it weird that all of the successful animation recently has put its main characters through panic attacks? Like,
00:46Anxiety has one here, Puss in Boots had one, Spider-Man had one, Mario basically had one.
00:52Maybe we're making these movies too hashtag relatable.
00:55If you don't know, Inside Out is all about the emotions inside of the head of a girl named Riley. Joy, sadness,
01:01disgust, fear, and anger. Together,
01:03they basically pilot Riley, helping her navigate her life and appropriately react to the situations put in front of her.
01:16While also keeping track of and organizing her memories. Memories are represented by glass balls,
01:22each glowing a color that corresponds to what type of memory it is. A happy memory, like watching WALL-E for the first time,
01:28it's yellow, like joy. But a sad memory, like watching Madame Webbe for the first time, it's blue, like sadness, etc, etc.
01:35But with Inside Out 2, Riley has grown a bit older and has now hit puberty,
01:39and you know what that means. A whole host of new, more complex emotions beyond the first five are introduced. For this movie,
01:46we have anxiety, envy, embarrassment, and ennui.
01:49That's boredom for us non-French speakers, with the hint that there are plenty of more emotions to come. A joke in the film has an
01:55emotion called nostalgia show up, though
01:57she's about 10 years too early and shouldn't be getting to Riley's head until her 20s.
02:01Remember when we all finally came up to headquarters?
02:05That was like 30 seconds ago nostalgia.
02:07But in the theater, this whole setup got my theorist Cogs a turn-in.
02:11So new emotions are showing up as Riley ages, and there are more on the way? For me,
02:16this really started to beg the question, is this what would actually happen?
02:20Yeah. Today, we're doing one of those classic,
02:22how right was the movie theories? And asking, how accurate is Inside Out? If we wanted to take a look at a real-world
02:29psychology and make a scientifically real version of Inside Out,
02:32what would the emotions in Riley's head actually be? And more importantly, using that knowledge,
02:37what would come next for the Inside Out franchise? Yeah, this movie made a billion dollars in two weeks.
02:42They're not not gonna be making an Inside Out 3, 4, 5, maybe a 6. I see you, Disney. I know you.
02:48Well, after doing the research,
02:49let me tell you, things are about to get way, way bigger for Inside Out.
02:53And if they follow the psychology, one of these emotions might be out of a job. So loyal theorists,
02:58let's get all in our feelings and dive in. First things first, if we're talking about how scientifically accurate things in this film are,
03:06obviously, we don't have a council of emotions driving our bodies from a control panel like a giant mech suit.
03:11Our brains are mushy and gooey and much more complicated than that. And sometimes,
03:16emotions aren't even the ones in the pilot seat at all. Often, our actions come from central cognition.
03:21That's the part of the brain that operates thinking and reasoning and often comes into conflict with how we're feeling.
03:27However, the point of this theory is to try to keep things to the premise of Inside Out. These conflicting emotions inside of Riley's head,
03:33deciding what the best thing for her is to do. So we are gonna keep that intact and just apply that to other real models
03:39of emotions created by real-world science and psychology.
03:42Just wanted to make sure that was clarified before we move on. To answer the question of how
03:47scientifically accurate Inside Out is, we first need to figure out just how many emotions people have.
03:51But there's a bit of a problem with that. Yeah, no one can really seem to agree on just how many emotions there are.
03:58Charles Darwin, yeah, the evolution guy, mapped out a full 34 emotions. The list's on screen.
04:03I am NOT saying all of these out loud.
04:05However, Rene Descartes classified the six primary passions to be wonder, love, hate, desire, joy, and sadness.
04:12But then if we go all the way back to Aristotle,
04:15he believed that all emotions could be traced to pleasure and pain or some combination of the two. As you can tell,
04:21actually figuring out what emotions there even are is surprisingly challenging. Something that Pixar themselves
04:26also discovered while making the movie. The director of the first film, Pete Docter, said that they were
04:31surprised at the disagreement in the scientific community about this and that there were versions of Inside Out that had as many as
04:3726 emotions early on. So how did they get these two dozen or so down to the ones we saw in the first movie? Joy,
04:43sadness, fear, disgust, and anger? Well, those actually follow some real-world research. In 1980,
04:50Professor Robert Plutchik of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine developed the Plutchik Wheel, which defined the core emotions as ecstasy,
04:57admiration, terror, amazement, grief, loathing, rage,
05:01and vigilance. This was then later narrowed down even further by psychologist Paul Ekman to joy, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and
05:09surprise. If that list sounds familiar, it should. Ekman was actually a scientific consultant on Inside Out and helped develop the cast.
05:16But already, I'm sure you're seeing some missing characters here. Surprise and amazement,
05:21which are kind of the same thing, are in both models, while admiration and vigilance from Plutchik's circle are nowhere to be seen.
05:28Gotta say, there are some missed opportunities here for fun characters. Like, I'm imagining surprise would just be like a shocked Pikachu meme,
05:34just hanging out in headquarters all day. And what would a vigilance character look like? Like some guy in a suit of armor?
05:39Or like a paranoid dude with binoculars across the street? Maybe both? We were robbed, Pixar. Robbed!
05:45Regardless, that's what Pixar used as a basis for both Inside Out and its sequel.
05:49But these six to eight emotions seem a bit limiting to express yourself, don't they? Humans are able to feel some pretty weird,
05:57complicated emotions that don't really boil down to just joy or fear or whatever, right? And because we want to see just how a
06:03scientifically accurate Inside Out would look, I started diving deeper into further studies and research about emotions to see what more we could find.
06:11And believe it or not,
06:12but I actually found a lot more in Plutchik's work that represents these more complex emotions.
06:17See, the Plutchik wheel is a bit more
06:19complicated than it looks at first glance because of a system between the spokes of the wheel called dyads.
06:24Basically, Plutchik believed that when two emotions are felt together, they create a new sub-emotion
06:29that's sort of a mix of the two. For example, when you feel both joy and anger, that would become pride. Fear and disgust
06:36would fusion dance to become shame. Joy and sadness would collab on bitter sweetness.
06:41And hey, that last one is something represented in Inside Out. At the end of the first movie,
06:46we see joy and sadness share one of Riley's childhood memories, and it becomes both blue and yellow. That
06:53previously happy memory is now bittersweet because it's part of a past that Riley has lost.
06:58So, that's a bit of a win for the movie here. Though, again,
07:01I'd love to see them try to design a character that was called Bittersweetness. Like, what would that look like?
07:06Maybe someone permanently stuck in, like, a smile cry?
07:08So, yeah. On the face of it, if we stick to the Plutchik wheel and the Ekman model,
07:13there's not a whole lot of deviation we need to make a fully accurate Inside Out.
07:17We just need a couple extra main emotions and then more representations of these dyads.
07:22However,
07:22I have to ask, after doing a bunch of research into the different ideas and models behind how we feel emotions,
07:29is the Plutchik wheel really the best thing we can do to really represent our scientifically accurate Inside Out?
07:36Are these emotions that Ekman chose really the best ones to show off the complex,
07:41wide range of human feeling? As someone with a passion for science,
07:45I was skeptical about that. And after doing a bit of digging,
07:48I found I wasn't the only one. Turns out, Ekman wasn't the only psychologist who consulted with Pixar for Inside Out.
07:55The other, Professor Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley,
07:59actually disagrees with Ekman about what is and isn't an emotion. Specifically, he pointed to love,
08:05amusement, and sympathy as hugely important emotions that didn't make the cut for the film. Now, that being said,
08:10I can see how amusement would be covered by joy, and you can sympathize with people based on what you feel, right?
08:16It's not necessarily connected to its own emotion. I mean, we literally see sadness sympathize with Bing Bong through sadness.
08:23It sounds amazing. I bet Riley liked it. Oh, she did. We were best friends.
08:28Yeah, it's sad.
08:30I'm okay now.
08:32How did you do that?
08:34I don't know. He was sad, so I listened to what-
08:36Hey! Bing Bong felt sad, and sadness knew what that felt like, so she sympathized. But, love?
08:42Yeah, I think love is kind of an important emotion that isn't really covered by any of the others.
08:46You can love things that make you happy, or sad, or angry, or that you're scared of. So, love really should be part of this
08:52cast of characters. Maybe it's like a Cupid-looking guy? And this goes even further with the sequel. Like, when I first saw some of the
08:58choices for the new cast in Inside Out, it kind of confused me. Like, okay, embarrassment and envy make sense,
09:04I guess, but anxiety? I've always thought of anxiety as being more thought-based than feeling-based.
09:09Like, your mind is racing out of control, and you get desperate and need to, like, throw on some lo-fi to chill yourself out.
09:15Oh, and speaking of, if you like the lo-fi that you're listening to right now,
09:18this is actually a project that we here at Theorist Made called Lore-Fi.
09:22It's chill beats with a mystery hidden inside of it for all you lore nuts,
09:25so go check that out if you're interested. Anyway, based on all of my research, professionals do consider anxiety to be an emotion,
09:31so, hey, you learn something new every day.
09:33But, even still, anxiety seems more like a subset of fear than its own emotion, doesn't it?
09:39They even sort of talk about that in the movie, and how similar fear and anxiety are. Would this
09:43actually be a character as important as we see in the movie, with this much power and authority over others?
09:49And then there's Ennui. There does seem to be some disagreement within the scientific community about whether this sort of boredom is an emotion,
09:56but to me, it always seemed more like the absence of an emotion, right?
10:00Regardless, even just the fact that there was so much disagreement about the number of emotions here amongst philosophers and psychologists,
10:06even ones that worked on Inside Out, it made me pause and wonder what else other professionals had to say about the Ekman model.
10:13And after doing some digging, I found this.
10:15According to a 2023 study from Scientific Reports, the Plutchik wheel and Ekman's model have some issues when you try to apply them to the real world.
10:24They found that while Ekman's model did help people who had trouble describing problems with emotions,
10:30so stuff like, I take issue with this because it made me mad, or I don't like this because it scares me,
10:35for people who were more emotionally mature, who had a better grasp on their emotions, or could detect the emotions of others,
10:41their feelings rarely lined up with Ekman or Plutchik's work.
10:45It was just too limiting or too simplistic.
10:47There wasn't enough nuance in the emotions represented by the Ekman or Plutchik models for it to actually be useful to them.
10:54So, all in all, that means that having the emotions in Riley's head be based on Ekman's model would make sense for her.
11:00She's a kid, but she's still discovering her emotions and how complex they can be and feeling two conflicting emotions at the same time.
11:07Having just a couple of emotions to point to, or maybe combine here or there, works for her.
11:12But the older her character gets, the less it's gonna work.
11:16See, as children age, the more complex their ability to feel emotions becomes.
11:20At birth, many people believe that children can only feel joy, anger, and fear,
11:24which then expands out into others like sadness, surprise, etc., etc.
11:29But when children hit puberty, their hormones supercharge the part of their brain that allows them to feel emotions,
11:35opening the door to a lot more intense and complex feelings.
11:38And there are a lot of these different new emotions, too, way more than the four that we see added in Inside Out 2.
11:44If we want a more scientifically accurate Inside Out, especially moving forward as Riley ages into adulthood,
11:51we need a better model to base these characters on, one that's more complex and offers more emotions.
11:56Thankfully, there's no shortage of these out there in the world of psychology.
12:00Now, there are plenty of wheels that offer a wider range of emotions than what Inside Out pulled from,
12:05and a lot of these would be good choices to build off of.
12:07However, the one that's the best option, in my eyes?
12:10This one, the Junto Institute Emotion and Feeling Wheel.
12:13Well, this is part of the wheel.
12:15Let's zoom out a bit, shall we?
12:17There we go, that's better.
12:18The Junto Wheel is a tool that helps build self-awareness and empathy,
12:23helping people identify more complex emotions that they're feeling by starting out with what it considers the core emotions.
12:29Joy, love, fear, anger, sadness, and surprise.
12:33From there, it expands outward into more specific sub-emotions of these core six.
12:38So, for example, you could be in a good mood, feeling joy or love,
12:42but if you wanted to identify a specific reason why,
12:45you expand that out into feeling something more specific, like optimism, or contentedness, or whatever.
12:51This wheel is often used in therapy or professional settings to identify complex feelings,
12:57and was designed to be the culmination of other, similar wheels.
13:00But why would we want to use this for Inside Out moving forward over other wheels?
13:04Well, professionals often point to one of the major advantages of the Junto Wheel
13:08being that it considers love as its own emotion.
13:11As we stated earlier, that was something that one of the psychologists Pixar hired to work on Inside Out
13:16thought was a hugely important emotion that was missing from the film.
13:19Additionally, it offers the most balanced number of what I'm gonna call positive and negative emotions,
13:25whereas other wheels often skew more heavily to one side or the other.
13:28But the biggest thing that the Junto Wheel has over a model like Plutchik's?
13:32It can get very, very specific.
13:35Like, you thought this was the whole thing? Nah, man, this is the full wheel.
13:39In total, we have 108 emotions represented here on the Junto Wheel,
13:43and they can get very granular and complex.
13:45I also quite like the color coding on this wheel.
13:48Many of the more complex sub-emotions have shades of multiple primary emotions in them.
13:52Some of them make a lot of sense.
13:54There are shades of purple, which is anger on this chart,
13:57and emotions categorized under fear or sadness.
14:00That checks out, right?
14:01They're closer together on the wheel, and a lot of the things that can make you angry can also be sad or scary.
14:06But others are way more nuanced, right?
14:09Like, there's a tinge of yellow, which is love, here, in the opposite emotion, grief.
14:14At first glance, that might not make a lot of sense,
14:16but I think Andrew Garfield put it the best when he said that grief is just love left unexpressed.
14:21Of course there'd be some yellow in there.
14:23And best of all, for our purposes today,
14:25almost all of the Inside Out emotions are present or easily slotted in.
14:29Anxiety is even a subset of fear, just like we discussed above.
14:33However, we do have to talk about the emotional elephant in the room.
14:36If we go with this model, the biggest change we're gonna have to make to Inside Out
14:39is that Disgust might be out of her job.
14:41Yeah, if you look here, Disgust is a subset of anger on the Junto chart,
14:45so Pixar might have to send Disgust packing.
14:48Or, well, maybe not.
14:49It's more like she's gonna be getting demoted.
14:51Because if we apply this new structure to Inside Out
14:54to figure out where Inside Out's going in the next installment,
14:57what Inside Out 3 is gonna look like?
14:59Well, just like this wheel has different layers, it has a hierarchy in its emotions.
15:03That's exactly what Inside Out should be doing.
15:05A truly scientifically accurate Inside Out would be like an office complex.
15:10At the top, we'd have these bigger emotions, the head honchos, so to speak,
15:14like joy, sadness, anger, fear, love, and surprise.
15:18And then under each of them, they would have emotions directly reporting to them.
15:21This is actually where Disgust would fall, reporting to anger,
15:24while other emotions like pride, optimism, shame, and disappointment
15:28would also be in this part of the structure.
15:30But then, under each of them, they would also have direct reports.
15:34Hope and eagerness would report to optimism.
15:37Guilt and regret would report to shame.
15:39So on and so forth, et cetera, et cetera.
15:42So yeah, like so much of real life,
15:44the emotions in Riley's head in Inside Out would be like an office building,
15:48complete with different departments and a bunch of bureaucracy.
15:51I wonder what human resources would be in this case.
15:54If I were a betting man, Inside Out 3 is gonna be dealing with exactly this.
15:58The more and more emotions get added to Riley's head,
16:01the more and more complex the structure's gonna become.
16:04Our core cast of emotions are gonna be getting more and more responsibilities,
16:07more and more emotions looking to them for guidance.
16:10And that's gonna add a lot of stress to them.
16:13And then, when Riley encounters the big emotional conflict of this movie,
16:16which will probably be either going to college or the death of one of her parents,
16:20things are gonna fall apart as this huge complex of emotions tries to deal with that.
16:25On paper, eh, maybe it doesn't sound super exciting,
16:28but this is Pixar we're talking about.
16:30If anyone's gonna make me cry at a bunch of emotions filing paperwork, it's them.
16:34But hey, did you know they're making an Inside Out spinoff show for Disney+,
16:37all about how Riley's dreams are made?
16:39It's gonna be like a little movie studio in her head,
16:41which made me wonder, how are they gonna handle teleprompters?
16:45Is that just me? Am I the only one who thinks about those sorts of things?
16:47Regardless, there wouldn't be a better choice for them than the sponsor of today's episode,
16:51Prompter People.
16:52Teleprompters are a huge part of the film and television industry.
16:55They're those little screens that you can put the script on,
16:57so you can read the script while you're actually looking at the camera.
17:00And...
17:02you should know this, too.
17:03Pretty much everybody uses a teleprompter,
17:05from late-night news to Mr. Beast to the president to us here at Theorist.
17:09Yeah, pretty much every time you see us on a green screen for a short or a social,
17:14or on the couch for a super-serious conversation,
17:16we're using a teleprompter.
17:18And it's not like these are only useful in big-budget situations, too.
17:21Everyone can use a teleprompter.
17:22Like, sure, you could read a script off of it,
17:25but you could also attach one of these to your computer.
17:27And if you're a streamer, throw your chat up on a teleprompter,
17:30and you can read chat while you're actually looking at your camera,
17:32so it feels like you're actually engaging with them.
17:35Chat, is this real?
17:36They're also a huge time-saver for editors.
17:38They help keep footage shorter, because you don't have to remember all of your lines,
17:42and they keep editing time shorter, because you don't have to dig through a ton of footage.
17:45Trust me, I've edited Food Theory before.
17:47So, when prompter people reached out offering to sponsor,
17:50it was a no-brainer to say yes.
17:52Prompter people make incredible products,
17:54designed and assembled in the United States.
17:57Like this bad boy, who is absolutely the big gun that they'd bring out in a newsroom.
18:01Smaller prompters that are easier to maneuver if you want to stay mobile.
18:04Even smaller prompters that you can plug into a tablet and perfect for DSLR cameras.
18:09And even itty-bitty prompters that you can stick on a phone and take anywhere.
18:12Prompter people's products are so easy to use,
18:14and they have options for all price points.
18:17So, if you want to take your content creation game to the next level,
18:19prompt smarter and go to prompterpeople.com.
18:22Thank you again to prompter people for sponsoring today's episode,
18:24and I'll see you all next week.