Two Sides to Every Story

In the Disney movie, Inside Out, the filmmakers cut back and forth between two concurrent actions; half of the movie focuses on the life of an adolescent girl, while the other half focuses on what is happening inside of her head. As discussed in the Assembling the Shots article by Dick, filmmakers often play with the idea of time and bring the first narrative to a certain point, leaving the reader in suspense, and then moving to the second narrative. These stories are eventually resolved separately or jointly.

The main character in the movie is Riley, and there are five characters in her head (anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and joy) that are controlling her thoughts and feelings while she goes about her life. For example, at one point in the movie there is a scene of Riley as a baby and her parents are feeding her broccoli. Then the movie cuts to the disgust character noticing the broccoli and taking action to make sure that baby Riley pushed the plate of broccoli on the floor before she was poisoned.

The movie then flashes back to Riley’s life, where the dad tells her that she can’t have any dessert because she didn’t eat her vegetables, which in turn prompts the anger character to react and causes Riley to cry.

In another part of the movie, Riley is getting ready for her first day of school when it suddenly cuts to her mind, where the fear character comes into view. He is walking around with a large stack of papers discussing all the possible things that could go wrong on the first day of school.

During the movie Riley’s family moves to a new city during her middle school years and this part of the movie does a lot of cutting back and forth between Riley and her family moving and the sadness character. For example when Riley’s teacher asks her to introduce herself in class, the movie flashes to sadness being in control of her mind.

The joy character plays a large role in the film and large portions of the movie quickly flip back and forth from Riley doing something she loves, like playing hockey, to Joy who is hard at work in her mind making sure that she is enjoying herself while playing hockey. You can see a video displaying more of the interaction between Riley and her mind here.

Just because the movie cuts back and forth between the events that are happening in Riley’s external and internal world, this doesn’t mean that aren’t happening at the same time. It wouldn’t make sense that Riley makes one move and then her life stops until the characters in her mind react. The two events are happening simultaneously and the filmmaker uses a certain technique to carefully choose when to cut from scene to scene.