I’ve seen inside my daughter’s mind and learned a humbling lesson
SARAH VINE on the extraordinary new film every mother MUST see
The release of DisneyPixar’s animated movie adventure, Inside Out, has been carefully timed to coincide with the start of the school holidays. Nothing is guaranteed to loosen the parental purse strings more than the prospect of a couple of hours of peace in a darkened, air-conditioned cinema.
But for once this will not be a case of pay up and put up. You won’t need to selfmedicate with a bumper pack of Maltesers to get through this one.
Because Inside Out is not just funny, clever, surprising, bonkers and multifaceted with a dual adult/child appeal that is Pixar’s trademark.
It’s also something that every parent since the dawn of humanity has wished they had: a clear operational guide to the inner workings of that most mysterious, complicated and frustrating of creatures: an 11-year-old child.
There are many things people warn you about when you have your first child. The sleepless nights, the nappies, the terrible twos, teething, biting, bedwetting.
But what no one tells you is that the really hard stuff — the things that keep you awake at night wondering where you went wrong and whether you can ever possibly hope to put it right — doesn’t arrive until much later.
Coping with a child’s transition from a simple, carefree little creature to the far more complex and ambitious organism that is a young adult is one of the hardest challenges any parent will face. Well, it’s certainly the hardest I’ve ever faced. It’s
no longer enough to feed, clothe and love them. Practically overnight you have to recast yourself as shrink, social worker, police officer and taxi driver. You become the focus for all their anger, fear and frustration.
Meanwhile, you’re undergoing a trauma of your own: you’re losing your baby. This new creature, no longer pliant and straightforward, is not yours anymore.
You can’t influence their mood, you can’t make it right for them. But still, their pain is your pain. You worry, constantly. There is so much that can — and will — go wrong.
What Inside Out does so brilliantly and with such charm is bring this process to life.
It gets under the skin of a pre-teen girl and lets you see, in glorious animation, the inner workings of her brain. And it’s not only very funny; it’s also fascinating — and, unlikely as it may sound, a rather deep piece of cinema.
The little girl in question, 11-year-old Riley, starts out as every mother’s fantasy of what a child should be.
Happy, sporty, loving, she has a wholesome best friend and a passion for ice hockey. She’s popular, well-liked and well rounded. And then the family move from rural Minnesota to urban San Francisco and everything changes.
There’s no garden any more, no lake to skate on, her house is dark and cramped and the traffic casts scary shadows on the wall of her tiny bedroom as it rumbles past in the night.
Her new school is big and frightening and full of cool girls, some of whom actually wear eye shadow (I mention this detail because it was the first item of make-up that my daughter, never previously interested in cosmetics, ‘stole’ from me when she started secondary school).
Her parents are stressed out because of the move and her father’s new business venture — and nothing seems right any more.
All of this is seen not from the outside, but through the eyes of five distinct characters in Riley’s head: her Emotions. These are the guys who really run the Riley show, the keepers of her consciousness. They operate out of a command pod, rather like the crew of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise.
They even have a console, complete with knobs and levers and flashing lights, which they use to direct Riley’s responses to events.
Their leader is Joy, a resolutely cando kind of girl, a twirling, whirling dynamo of happiness, all shimmering with excitement and delight.
THEn there’s too- cool-forschool Disgust; Anger, a sort of inner John Humphrys, primed to kick off at the slightest provocation; Fear, all weedy and whiney; and Sadness, a shy, rather dumpy blue creature brilliantly voiced by Phyllis Smith.
The plot is a fairly straightforward quest narrative — Homer’s Odyssey retold in cartoon form.
Through a series of minor disasters, Joy and Sadness become stranded in the darker corners of Riley’s consciousness. Anger, Disgust and Fear find themselves in control.
They soldier on as best they can, but without the benign influence of Joy, nothing quite seems to work.
Riley’s world begins to crumble. All her childhood certainties — family, friendship, her passion for hockey — falter and fall one by one.
It’s a wild, bittersweet journey full of twists and turns, and gripping entertainment. But it also offers a real insight into the way children work; and some incredibly powerful lessons about being a parent.
Most notable of all is the figure of Joy. With her endless (and actually rather irritating) head-girl enthusiasm, she is the archetypal mother figure.
It took me a while to figure this out, but once the penny dropped, it was embarrassing how much she reminded me of myself, all forced jollity and cringing positivity.
Of course, Joy means well. All she wants is for Riley to be happy — don’t all parents? But until I saw this film, it had never occurred to me how absurd that idea is. nor had I realised how selfish it is.
Because the happiness that Joy wants for Riley (or I for my own daughter) is not on the girl’s terms — it’s on Joy’s. She’s a control freak. She thinks she’s acting in Riley’s best interests, but really she’s just doing everything to stop her from growing up, so she can continue to control her.
Before I watched this film, I’d never quite understood what teenagers mean when they accuse their parents of being too controlling.
As a parent, it just seems like the standard rebel- without- a- cause response of someone who doesn’t know what’s good for them.
But this made me think. Why exactly do I want my children to be happy? Is it because I genuinely have their best interests at heart? Or is it because they’re less hard work for me that way? It also made me think of my own teenage years. Sorrow and fear were definitely my dominant characteristics.
I was a withdrawn teenager who moved around a lot from school to school and country to country.
Each time I found it har der a nd harder to fit in, more exhausting trying to open up a space for myself among the wellestablished friendships of my peers.
Like the character of Sadness, I started to believe that I could do nothing right.
In the film, all the happy memories that Sadness touches turn permanently blue: I was that girl.
At one point, at the height of a crisis, Joy draws a very small circle on the floor and tells Sadness that her job is to not step outside it, under any circumstances.
That took me straight back to the age of 12 or 13. Just make yourself as small and as invisible as possible, and try not to make any mistakes: that was the mantra that got me through the day.
now that my daughter is the same age, I don’t want her to feel that way. I want to usher her past that awkward, lonely, confused stage and straight to the bit where she’s a nobel prize--
Winning neurosurgeon (no pressure, you understand). Not that I’d quite realised any of this until I watched Inside Out. But it’s true: I now see that throughout this year, her first at secondary school, I have been re-living the anxieties I felt when I was her age.
Only now I’m the grown-up; I’m the one who’s supposed to have all the answers.
Meanwhile, the mother in me wants to protect her, but what I realise now, having watched this film, is that I’m living in cloud cuckoo land if I think I can shield her from reality. And even if that were possible, which is not, I now also realise that it wouldn’t be the right thing either. Because allowing my child to experience some of the more negative emotions is surely a key part of her developmental process. I can’t wrap her in cotton candy for ever, like the Joy character tries to do. I can’t draw a small circle on the pavement and keep all her Sadness inside.
I have to let her experience all these new and powerful emotions because, like them or not, they form part of a rounded personality — and she needs to know how to cope with them. The difficult part, of course, is knowing what constitutes normal turmoil and when serious warning lights are flashing. The crisis point in the film comes Then Riley, unable to experience Joy Sadness, is left with only Anger, ar and Disgust to guide her. Enable to see a way through her situation, overwhelmed by negative emotions, she resolves to run away back to Minnesota, to the only place can remember being happy. That is the perfect storm every parreally dreads: the moment when their child simply cannot be reached. And this, I must confess, was the point at which I, cynical old me, felt the embarrassing prick of tears in the corner of my eye.
I think it would have got me anyway, but in this week of all weeks it really touched a chord. Because I’ve been thinking a lot about my fellow writer, the novelist Julie Burchill, whose son Jack committed suicide in June after years of struggling with depression and drug abuse.
Last weekend, Burchill wrote with searing honesty and far greater eloquence than I ever could about her son’s death.
She hollowed out her heart, laid herself bare with grief and guilt. But hard as she is on herself, the truth is that, like any mother, Burchill did everything within her power to help her son.
She nurtured him, encouraged him, put up with his abusive behaviour, bankrolled him. But something in the boy just seemed to have broken, something that no amount of love — from friends, family, his parents — seemed able to fix.
In his eulogy at his son’s funeral, the young man’s father, Cosmo Landesman, described it: ‘I looked at my old photos of Jack as a baby and a toddler and Jack as a young boy and in every photo there’s this big, happy Jack smile. It’s the beaming smile of a boy lost in joy.
‘But as Jack gets older, something happens. You can see it in the photographs: his smile is missing. The joy has disappeared.’
Those words: the joy has disappeared. It seems absurd, but they rang in my ears as I watched this children’s film, with its blue- haired heroine Joy, desperately trying to find her way back to the emotional mothership. And I cried for these people I’ve never even met, and for their son whom I never knew and for what he told his father about why he wanted to end it all.
‘It’s like being underwater and looking up to the surface where you can see the people that love you trying to reach in to pull you out of the water,’ Jack told his father. ‘ But no matter how persistently they try, you are totally beyond their reach as you continue to plummet to the bottom of the ocean.’
There but for the grace of God go all of us. Not just with our own young selves (I can remember feeling that way from time to time, though luckily it never stuck), but with our children.
Perhaps I’m being a bit silly, bringing all this up in the context of a children’s film. But sometimes the most seemingly banal things can touch us deep in our hearts, and for me Inside Out, with its funny little characters, got me square in the chest.
Spoiler alert: the film closes with the five emotions reunited, gazing out in awe at the new landscape of Riley’s emotional consciousness, and having a new command console installed.
It’s much bigger and more complicated than Riley’s childhood console — and it has a shiny new red button marked ‘puberty’.
‘What’s this?’ wonders Sadness. ‘I don’t know,’ says Joy, ever optimistic. ‘But what could possibly go wrong now?’ ha! What indeed. But one thing’s certain: Disgust and Anger will be taking starring roles in the sequel.
And I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing a cameo from Sloth, Lust and Drama Queen. Poor Joy is going to have her work cut out.
The fee for this article has been donated to Mind, the mental health charity, in memory of Jack Landesman, the son of writers Julie Burchill and Cosmo Landesman.