Joy And Sadness In Inside Out

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Pages: 7

In the film, Inside Out (Docter, 2015), the connection between Joy and Sadness works to explain the relationship between the mind, brain, and body, of their host child, Riley, and by extension, the minds, brains, and bodies of its audience. The importance of the Joy and Sadness connection demonstrates that while the classic “theory of mind” approach holds that we understand things through immediate reflection of our ability to attribute mental states like beliefs, intentions, desires, knowledge, and perspectives, to ourselves and to others, these animated characters, all while understanding that others, again including these animated characters that we know to be mediated by the hands of artists, have beliefs, desires, intentions, and viewpoints …show more content…
Not just our ‘cognition’… Theory of the mind … posits that we understand things or people by reflecting. In contrast, the mirror mechanism suggests that it is not a matter of reflection at all: you feel what the other person is feeling or what the character is doing on screen because the same thing is happening in you (Badt).
In Inside Out, Gallese's theory of embodied simulation works to explain our empathy, especially with the character Sadness because we are able to feel what the character feels. We are further able to understand and identify with Sadness because our whole body is in attendance to her animated involvement, putting us in a space where the same thing is happening to us. In the case of Inside Out, the space is inside Riley’s head, and built on the shifting psychical landscape of her
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The fact that we see these qualities rebound over and over makes Joy admirable in that she doesn’t give up, and finds a way to “shine” even when locked in darkness. But it is Sadness who finds a way to understand the thought and value of who she is: she is the one who reads the rule book and understands order in the midst of an abstracted worldview. In responding to the intensity of her nature, Sadness has an instinctive need to touch Riley’s memories, and that need becomes stronger in Headquarters, and irresistible outside of it.
Forced by the nature of what she is, Sadness is blue. Forced by the emotion and expectation of what she is, her clothing is modest and shows very little skin and she wears shoes, thereby limiting opportunities to physically interact with her solely to her head, face, and hands. Her covered skin becomes an artifact of her vulnerability, and a strong reminder of her need to touch Riley’s memories, making them token or touchstones of