Inside Out

In the very early morning if you tune into Iowa CatholicRadio, you can hear a spot on the EWTN Sunrise Morning Show that is dedicated to movie reviews. As a Catholic parent, it isn't very practical to pre-view every single movie that your child will see, so this can be really helpful when trying to discern what is (and isn't) good for our kids and even us grownups to watch.  A few weeks ago, I caught enough of the review on the new Pixar movie, Inside Out, that I decided it would be okay to take my family and check it out. 

I was not disappointed.

The prevailing descriptor for this movie has been one word: clever. Most of the action in the movie takes place on the inside of a little girl's head, centered in her "control center" where the characters are played by her prevailing emotions (or her "passions" for you classically trained philosophers out there): Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear.

I loved this movie, which, since I can be pretty hard to please cinema-wise, is a big deal for me. There are so many great life lessons to be learned and interesting thoughts to be "thunk" for grownups and kids alike.

For one thing, all of the emotion characters most respected JOY. Even if they sometimes "drove", they recognized the value of trying to always see the positive and to choose Joy. Even they knew that things rarely go well when your primary driver is disgust, fear, anger, or sadness. Interestingly, though, the movie doesn't fall into the trap of teaching that all can be solved by being a cock-eyed optimist. Sometimes, in fact, those other emotions can serve very useful purposes, especially when they "drive" together with Joy.

About all I could say was, "Wow." It isn't very often that you get a message from a major motion picture that life can be hard and beautiful at the same time, or that our emotions are not just something that happen to us, but something that we can choose.  As Christians, it is especially poignant to see how Sadness and Joy can blend together in a situation that involves suffering. 

If you haven't watched this movie with your family yet, I encourage you to do so and to take some time over ice cream and talk about it afterward. Maybe your child or you will come up with even more interesting ideas from this movie about the meaning of life and how we respond to it. Clever movies like this one aren't necessarily designed to lead us one way or the other, but to affect everyone in different ways from the inside - out!