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Speaking of the best performing movies this summer, it is undoubtedly "Inside Out 2" produced by Pixar Animation. (hereinafter referred to as "Inside Out 2"). Although the film received mediocre reviews in mainland China, it still received more than 300 million yuan in box office. As of the end of July, the film's global total box office reached 1.462 billion US dollars. This makes the film not only easily the highest-grossing movie in 2024, but also surpasses Disney's previous best-selling "Frozen 2", becoming the number one animated film in the history of box office.

Inside Out 2 poster

An unexpected first in film history?

Before the release of this animation, a series of Pixar works, whether it was "The Metamorphosis" which was forced to be released on streaming media due to the epidemic, the silent "Onward", or the mediocre "Element City", were either criticized for being conservative or criticized for being creative but lacking surprises in the story. Under the influence of the failure of the parent company Disney's streaming strategy, the originally highly anticipated "Lightyears" was regarded as a disastrous project with both box office and reputation failures. In May of this year, Pixar announced a 14% layoff, nearly 175 people, which seemed to make people no longer have confidence in this pioneering animation company. The huge success of "Inside Out 2" is obviously of extraordinary significance to Pixar.

Nine years ago, Inside Out, written and directed by Pete Docter, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won praise from the media and audiences. The creative team also won a number of awards, from the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film to the Annie Award for Best Animated Feature Film. What kind of animation is Inside Out 2 today?

In 2024, this work that abandons pluralism, avoids hot topics, and simply tells the story of a little girl's growth has aroused such widespread resonance. As a movie, how does it exercise its psychological "healing" function? Is it the same for us to cry in a massage chair in a movie theater and cry on a sofa in a psychological clinic that costs 20 times more? The film accurately depicts the emotional storm and asks the audience: Is anxiety the spiritual background of our times that we cannot avoid? How does Pixar consistently heal our wounds and integrate our broken lives?

Am I loved unconditionally by my emotions?

Pixar's production strategy encourages creators to tell "your own unique experience". For example, "The Metamorphosis" uses the first menstruation of a little Chinese girl as the theme, delicately exploring the relationship between mother and daughter in a Chinese family; "Elemental City" is also rooted in reality, and makes a realistic depiction of family expectations and cultural conflicts in East Asian immigrant families. However, despite the excellent production and reputation of these works showing multiculturalism, they failed to become the key for Pixar to open the door to a new world due to mediocre market response. "Inside Out 2" abandons its cultural uniqueness and returns to the growth story of a white middle-class child in North America that is familiar to the audience. It avoids the diversity and complexity of reality, and places people's frustrations and situations in and only in the picture of psychology for discussion.

The plot of the "Inside" series is not complicated, and even a little thin. The main plot of the first part is the psychological confusion caused by the father's job change and relocation. The second part is even simpler, mainly revolving around a competition to enter the ice hockey team. A few events constitute the long-term vision of the story, while the real Riley only serves as the stage for the story to take place - the real first heroine is not Riley, but the emotional little man Lele. She is the one who needs to complete the growth course in the story. And "Lele" does not represent a child, but a Pixar-style "parental heart" hidden behind the children's movie.

Stills from Inside Out 2

It is not difficult to see that the emotional little people who went through fire and water for Riley in "Inside" are no different from the group of old toys who worried about Andy in "Toy Story". The protagonists of the film are born to serve their masters, love their masters, and everything revolves around their masters. Even if they are abandoned and damaged, they cannot shake their loyalty to their mission.

Imagine that in today's turbulent and fragile interpersonal relationships, there are accusations of emotional selfishness and complaints about the exhaustion of life, but in the animated story, there is always such a group of absolutely selfless people who put "you" in the most important position in their hearts. They are more responsible than parents, more loyal than friends, and more passionate than lovers, from beginning to end until death. Not only that, once you can't see or need them, they will disappear without complaint. Just like the most tear-jerking popsicle in the first film, after Riley no longer needs this childhood fantasy friend, he bravely chooses to "commit suicide" and disappears forever in the memory cemetery. These active protectors, selfless lovers who do not ask for anything in return, are actually the incarnations and projections of everyone's ideal parents and lovers.

The scientific consultant for the first film was Paul Ekman, a professor at the University of California. After the film was released, he wrote a guide for parents on his website, using the Riley family as an example to help parents better understand their own and their children's emotions. Ekman wrote a guide for parents (A Parents' Guide). This just shows that the real audience of Pixar animation is not children, but adults who are emotionally troubled and tortured, and parents who are trying to understand and do their jobs well.

Therefore, it is not difficult to see that joy, sorrow and other emotions are not only "my emotions", but also "my perfect parents and lovers". They are the embodiment of absolute love and the belief in love that we still desire even if we have never encountered it in reality.

How did the movie do this? In the first movie, there is a plot design based on science: On their adventure, Popsicle and Lele accidentally knocked over two boxes of cards, one of which was filled with facts and the other with fiction. Popsicle nonchalantly mixed the two types of cards and repacked them, saying: We often confuse them anyway.

This plot illustrates that it is normal for the audience to confuse fact and fiction. The movie is fictional, but the emotional response aroused by the story is real. Watching a horror movie will give you a real fright, and watching a heartwarming story will give you a corresponding inspiration. Therefore, the beliefs implanted through the story can also be true. Although the myth of eternal love has long been bankrupt, the love that has been reinterpreted under the premise of science has naturally planted a positive belief tree in the audience's anxious and painful hearts. The acceptance of love is ultimately solved as an epistemological issue here.

Therefore, it is precisely in the process of watching ourselves being persuaded that we gain an understanding of love. Through fictional experience, the inexplicable pain can be sorted out, explained, understood, and settled. In this sense, what Pixar provides for our fragmented reality is not the promise of illusory earthly happiness, but a large-scale public psychological integration service through the screen. This is also the creative magic weapon that Pixar has never lost since "Toy Story".

What’s even more interesting is that if we pay attention, we will find that this story, which seems to have nothing to do with real-life conflicts and sharp ideologies, intentionally or unintentionally reveals a real-life metaphor that is far more cruel than the support of love.

The ultimate destiny of workers?

If we regard the world of the mind as a mirror of the external world, we will find that it has a cinematic media environment, a hierarchical social environment, and a working-class cultural environment.

For example: There are countless screen media in the brain. In the brain control room, emotions need to receive external information and give feedback through a large screen with an ultra-wide field of view. The contents of one memory ball after another are reproduced again through a projection mechanism similar to a movie camera. Just as Musk tried to turn the human brain into a screen medium through Neuralink, here, the brain is already the image medium itself. The creators here use the familiar movies and theater devices as an excellent symbol of the world of the mind.

The screen plays a huge role in this world inside the brain. There is a very meaningful scene in the film, but it is slightly out of the plot: the Emotional Five are kicked out of the control room by Jiaojiao, and on the way back they encounter the House of Cards amusement park where Riley grew up. Lele is very happy to see the familiar amusement park at first, saying that the place has not disappeared but has been expanded. But when she ran in, she found that the amusement park had become a Cubicle Office separated by playing cards, a typical modern office landscape and a visual form of slavery.

The object of these enslaved painters’ orders is precisely Jiaojiao’s face, which is everywhere on the big screen. Jiaojiao himself is not there, nor does he need to be there. His “remote presence” through modern media is enough to drive people to constantly draw key paintings that can generate anxiety. The reason why this painting scene is so meaningful is that the animators used their most familiar work experience to metaphorically represent the creative environment in which the animators are manipulated. It is also hard not to remind people of Pixar’s creations influenced by its parent company Disney. The pillow fight and screen smashing at the end of this scene undoubtedly remind people of the famous Apple advertisement - the shattered face of Big Brother behind the screen.

Stills from Inside Out 2

In contrast to the dark cinema space, in the film, our dark insides and invisible minds are flipped into a bright outside, which is expressed as the "inside out" in the title.

However, when the invisible becomes visible, the mind also loses its mystery and poetry. Under the powerful explanatory power of psychology, everything in the soul is degraded to mental. Looking at the topographical features of our brain world, we can see that the corresponding mechanism between this psychological world and the external world is actually the result of hermeneutics. This world has rivers, canyons, abysses, and electrified modern transportation, but there are no flowers, plants, trees, and any natural objects with mysterious colors that have never existed for humans. In other words, there is nothing here that Riley has never felt. This is a world that has been selected and everything can be explained. In this world, its social form and division of labor are symbolized as a hierarchical society similar to "Cells at Work!" For example, emotions have basic human shapes and personalities and are engaged in relatively "advanced" work, but other cleaners, builders, etc. are distributed in the brain. These workers simply lose their basic human shapes and only have a general geometric outline.

However, how do "senior workers" like Lele and Youyou survive? They are "thrown" into a 7/24 hour work environment where they cannot quit (Papa once tried to quit, but Yanyan reminded him that emotions cannot quit). They spend their whole lives facing a workbench full of buttons and joysticks, and there are piles of application manuals to read (although only the repressed Youyou finished reading these official documents). But they don't seem to care about how these buttons and joysticks really work, nor do they understand: when Jiaojiao appeared and dragged out his small control panel from the big console, Lele actually thought it was a coffee holder - a typical Kafkaesque world.

In other words, here, just like the electrified world dominated by modernism depicted in Chaplin's Modern Times, man is just a strange existence in a huge and complex mechanical world. He does not understand his own situation, nor can he question the meaning of his work. In addition to conscientiously completing his work at the execution level, he does not know what other possibilities there are for survival. Although living in a child's head, he has never had a minute to play. Non-stop work is everything for them from birth to death.

When Lele was thrown out of the "office" because of a mechanical accident or failure in a power struggle, her reaction was not to explore this new world she had never set foot in, but to say, I have to go back to work! I have to go back to the office immediately! Lele does not work for wages. In fact, emotions are not paid. Work is her "destiny", her survival is her life, and her life is her work. The same is true for Jiaojiao, who seems to be a villain. The disagreement between him and Lele is only a technical disagreement in work ideas. In the end, everything was forgiven, resolved and sublimated in the name of love for Riley. This kind of work meaning filled with love and full of meaning undoubtedly makes us, the wage slaves in the modern capitalist system who are tortured by work and separated from the body and soul, experience a long-lost sense of meaning and mission.

The one who can really beat Jiaojiao is the nostalgic grandma?

Anyway, the story of the second part makes Riley enter adolescence, but in fact it avoids the real troubles of adolescence. For example, Riley, who has just developed acne on her chin, has not yet ushered in her sexual enlightenment. Her brain control room may have to expand several times to accommodate more than 20 different emotions in reality. More negative guilt, self-blame, shame, inferiority, etc. are not within the scope of discussion of the film. And whether it is the emotions that control me, or I control the emotions, such spiraling thinking questions, I am afraid that there will be no answer for a while. The creators avoided other emotions related to adolescence that can be made into a big fuss, and very thoughtfully chose to use "anxiety" as the theme of this episode, which is indeed a choice that fits the spirit of the times.

In an era that increasingly emphasizes competition, efficiency, and life based on winning or losing, everyone has a job to do and a debt to pay. The competition is not only about progress or regression, but also about the speed and efficiency of progress. Everything is like sailing against the current, and you can't stand up straight, let alone lie flat. In such an environment, what we are most familiar with is the anxious emotional storm, and only anxiety is the most realistic emotion.

However, there is no real villain in the story. Even bad emotions have a good heart. Jiaojiao is portrayed as a protector who is just an inappropriate protector. In essence, like Lele, he will give everything for Riley. Moreover, in order to respond to anxiety, Pixar also has a special comforting backhand, that is, when the original object of passion (for Riley, it is ice hockey) is no longer the same as before, childhood is fading, and Riley wants to become a qualified human being, but there is still a long way to go in adolescence. The creators chose to let nostalgia appear at the right time.

Stills from Inside Out 2

The nostalgic grandma who rarely appears is one of the few ways out for us in this world where we must advance or retreat. Nostalgia seems to be the most useless, but like anxiety, it is a powerful psychological motivation for us. Every time we walk into the theater, we are reliving things that have happened thousands of times and recalling memories that have long been forgotten. Pixar made the audience wait for 9 years to see the sequel, and the audience who have already entered different new stages of their lives have deep nostalgia for it. The nostalgic grandma is as important as Jiaojiao, and is the other half of the important motivation for the 1.4 billion box office.

"Inside Out 2" is a film by Pixar that uses solid cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) psychology to complete a nostalgia for the past, comfort for the present, and a call for an imagined future. It is not difficult to imagine that when we listened to the repeated "I'm not good enough" in the theater and recognized our own expressions on the stiff and scorched faces, everyone would probably feel that a pair of melancholy little blue hands gently placed on our broken hearts.