If you don't Mind...?

Pixar have always been at the top of their game when it comes to extending and conveying countless emotions to the audience by mere means of breathing life into what would otherwise be bland agglomeration of millions of colored artificial dots.

From wielding a humane love story with a junk carrying, ugly robot at the center of a dying planet, to manifesting heart wrenching moments as you trudge alongside an old man grappling with his memories in his giant Helium balloon, folks at Pixar have always given us tears and smiles in quick succession.

Just when you begin to think that there’s no more level to up the ante, and you’re quiet sure that people working at their Emeryville, California office must have exhausted all the ideas of possibly playing around with CGI, there comes ‘Inside Out’. A movie so refreshing and profound that you envy the kids who get to understand the most mystifying of nature’s creations, our cryptic and misunderstood human mind, in such a simple and interesting format, at such a tender age, without having to attend the tedious and dull psychology lectures.

Having watched the movie over the week, I was itching to deconstruct it and discuss the possible intentions of the movie with people, but the lack of similar interest it evoked in people around me led me to interpret it in public and hence the analysis comes with a warning of a one dimensional review and a possibility of bias creeping in.

There are some brilliant concepts and analogies which strew this movie’s timeline. The construct of memory tagging shown wonderfully by little glow balls, tinted with color of emotions, is very perceptive; then there are the core memories which our feelings are committed to protect, the thought train which sporadically keeps running across the mind, the dream makers’ production house, the imagination land, your imaginary childhood buddies, all these tiny little details make this a very comprehensive depiction of what for most part of life stays within the confines of our cranium but defines all of it.

Though the movie is infused with these marvelous little nuances, the biggest and the meatiest of the slice which it brings to the table is the core message it conveys – The importance of appropriate emotions in our life.

Our society has always revered and honored the positive emotions, being a strategic optimist has always been looked at in a much better way than a defensive pessimist. Extroversion has always been hailed and lauded, while introversion has been looked down upon, happiness trounces sadness on all scales of acceptability.

But what this movie emphasizes on is that it’s okay to be sad if you’re going through a tough time, more than anything it is the expression of the right kind of emotion that matters. Any misplaced positive emotion occupying your face will not bring you happiness but being ‘able to feel what is normal to feel in a situation’ is what will. This sinusoidal curve, that life is, doesn’t always bring us happy moments but also a lot grief and sadness, and the best way to proceed forward is to be on the outside what you are on the inside.

All of us, like Joy, feel that sadness needs to be relegated to a corner in order to be happy. But it’s not the limiting of sadness to its tiny circle which can bring about happiness, but it is sadness co-existing and collaborating with the other feelings which can eventually bring us peace. Sadness is therapeutic in nature, it can transform grief, not instantly but gradually it does so by just allowing one to cry it out, by just letting the normal emotions flow, or at times just by drawing external help.

And that’s why at times all that we need, is to be allowed to be sad. Perhaps, we need to accept, that the regular downtrodden path filled with optimism isn’t quite the solution always, it might just be a good idea at times to take the road less travelled.