With more than 1 billion euros raised in the few weeks since its release, Inside Out 2the sequel to Pixar’s 2015 hit, is already the highest-grossing film of the year. If the previous installment delved into the mental processes of a girl, Riley, shown in the manner of a production plant where emotions (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear, like fantastic creatures) had to work as a team, this sequel returns to the character in her adolescence, a vital stage in which, within the narrative, new emotions manifest themselves: Anxiety, Shame, Envy and Ennui –the last, a kind of cross between boredom and apathy–. Although the film has been a financial breath of fresh air for the Disney-owned studio, after the Lightyear (2022) and Elementary (2023) achieved more discreet results, the critics have not been as enthusiastic about Inside Out 2 as it was with the original, due to the loss of the surprise factor and a very similar plot structure.
“It feels more like downloadable extra content than a story that stands on its own,” I wrote Journalist Jay Caspian Kang in a column in The New Yorker. “Its huge success suggests that there will be more additional content. Perhaps in Inside Out 8 Let’s meet a 44-year-old Riley and learn about the four new emotions that drive her life: Dysthymia, Indifference, Displaced Anger, and Rationalized Disappointment.” Her colleague Richard Brody, another prominent writer for the same publication, was precisely one of the few dissenting critics when the original film was released, of which wrote: “I saw a pitch to transform the children into beings as artificial and uniform as those created by computer in the film. Instead of the mysteries and wonders of life, of the big dreams and big fears, Reverse offers problems to solve, a narrow life of narrow perspectives, experiences, fantasies and desires.”
Inside Out 2 is part of a new commercial strategy from the studio, which the company’s creative chief, Pete Docter, explained Thus in a controversial interview last May in Bloomberg: “The studio’s films should be less about a director’s search for catharsis and more about speaking to a common experience,” which seemed to allude to more personal titles like Luca (2021), Grid (2022) or Elementaryall by migrant directors or descendants of migrants, with elements of their cultures integrated into the animation. Docter, who does not repeat at the helm of the sequel, was the director of the first installment of Reverse and also other great hits from the golden age of the studio such as SA monsters (2001) or Up (2009). The film about creatures that get energy by terrorizing children shares with Reverse The corporate approach, like his latest work, Soul (2020), where the Afterlife has an industrial operation and souls are allowed to be born on Earth once they complete training.
The cultural critic Alberto Corona analyzed in his two volumes of The other Disney (2020-23, Applehead Team) the line of live-action films developed by the factory since the 1940s, in a tour of the business strategies, social situations and ideological discourses that permeated the studio’s proposals during the last century. At the end of the second volume, the journalist spoke of Disney’s transformation into the great entertainment conglomerate that it is now, after buying Pixar in 2006, Marvel in 2009, Lucasfilm (with the rights to Star Wars and Indiana Jones) in 2012 or Fox in 2019. Although Corona believes that there has been an aesthetic homogenization between the different Disney properties, with “some production modes associated with the images of amusement parks and their shows”, he also thinks that the case of Pixar deserves to be analyzed as a separate phenomenon. In your criticism For elDiario.es, it also notes the studio’s tendency to set its stories in “corporate scenarios.”
“The certain decline of Pixar is blamed on being under Disney, which now makes many more sequels, but the ideology that Pixar brought fits very well with Disney in this later phase of capitalism,” Corona explains to ICON. “It was born at the end of the eighties within the framework of a new ideology of capital, that of Silicon Valley, with that corporate thing of how cool the company is and how we are a big family, maintaining individual distinction. There we have the figure of Steve Jobs (who was the main shareholder of the company). If Pixar has been so eager to put the characters in companies, to conceive every possible imaginary, every aspect of life that you can see as something wonderful and stimulating and put it in an office, I think it has been for that reason. Reverse It is the pinnacle of this way of thinking, because that is where the emotions are already going through this roller.”
What seems to prove Docter right about the universal vocation of Reverseaside from the configuration of its imaginary world, is the reaction of the public. Beyond the box office figures, the sequel has also led many viewers to share on social networks the experience they had watching the film and the intimate way in which they connected with its representation of anxiety. Leticia Porto Pedrosa, PhD in Communication Sciences and Sociology from the Complutense University of Madrid, who has published several theses on social models present in animated film, highlights that the film “marks an interesting final reflection on the importance of caring for mental health in adolescents to achieve a full life in the future.”
The academic cites both in her doctoral thesis and in her research To read Donald Duck (1972), the classic by Ariel Dorfmann and Armand Mattelart about Disney’s political broadcasts, although he believes that “the values and messages (of the studio) have been adapted over time.” “At the time, it was a revolution to include new princesses in the Disney repertoire, such as Mulan (1998), Tiana (from The Princess and the Frog2009) or Brave (2012). “The social structures and models that are disseminated respond to social demands and new realities,” Porto Pedrosa tells ICON, who also believes that “Pixar films are full of wonderful lessons that are not taught as much in the family or at school.”
In this sense, Alberto Corona recalls that “the explosion of mental health as a kind of fetish in public conversation has been subsequent to Reverse”. “It wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that she was a bit of a precursor to this idea of assuming sadness as part of life, which is not a bad way of thinking,” the critic reasons. “I don’t think there is any cynicism in bringing mental health closer and giving children an explanation that can be useful in their daily lives.”
Emotions, let’s get to work
In the book Disney, Culture, and Curriculum (2016, unpublished in Spain), author Jake Burdick directly links seminal Disney short films such as Willie and the Steamboat (1928) and The three Little Pigs (1933) with Pixar productions now made under its umbrella. “Reverse “It continues to evoke values that coincide with the logic of productivity and the working self, as well as a fixation on childhood as a traumatic but necessarily lost object within the world of work. (…) As harmony is achieved within its kind of psychic factory, all emotions become more productive, joyful and satisfied in their work,” writes Burdick, who, despite the “affective turn” that he believes the study has taken in recent times, refers to its recent efforts as “reinventions of fantasies” Fordists for contemporary sensibilities.” However, the notion of emotions at work is not, by any means, attributable to the imagination of Disney and Pixar.
Marxist author Eva Illouz, who has studied, among other topics, the role of psychology in shaping modern identity, proposed the concept of “emotional capitalism” in the first decade of the 21st century to discuss the modern co-production between economy and emotions. María Tocino Rivas, PhD in Philosophy from the University of Salamanca, published last year Emotional capitalism. From Eva Illouz to the theorists of biocapitalism (Dykinson), see Reverse as “a clear expression of the fact that we live in what Eva Illouz calls therapeutic culture, in which the categories of clinical psychology permeate the collective imagination.” “One of the features of this therapeutic culture, and of the paradigm of emotional capitalism of which it is a part, is what Illouz calls the rationalization of emotional life, a process of objectification of emotional states and processes, which is linked to the introduction of economic logic into the intimate life of subjects,” the professor tells ICON.
“The ideal of emotional management is part of this paradigm,” he adds. “Although it is a multi-causal phenomenon, one factor that explains the spread of therapeutic culture has to do with the appearance, in neoliberal capitalism, of work models that demand permanent management of the self. This is because, as theorists of biocapitalism argue, work increasingly involves more aspects such as interpersonal relationships, the production and management of immaterial goods or the use of new technologies. It is increasingly difficult to separate work from life, and emotional management becomes essential. Likewise, these new work models generate psychological discomfort linked to precariousness, instability or the difficulty in distinguishing personal life from work. Anxiety is one of its main manifestations, and that is why it takes on such importance in the second film of Reverse”.
The author, however, believes that “this therapeutic culture of which Reverse is expression” can contribute positively to “depathologizing mental health problems and spreading practices related to the relief of psychological discomfort.” Tocino Rivas also refers to the book Discomfort: When being unwell is a collective problem (2022), by Marta Carmona and Javier Padilla, to remind us that “it is essential that therapy be accompanied by a structural approach to the socio-historical causes that determine the discomfort”. Precisely, the journalist Alberto Corona recognizes that his main problem with the films of Reverse is his portrait of mental health “as something isolated from society.” “Riley’s entire crisis is solved with her emotions, learning to organize herself better, when what is happening to her, which is that she is leaving her friends aside to integrate into a new group, could be solved by having a conversation with those girls,” explains the author of ICON. The other Disney.
Crown claims Gridthe Pixar film released directly on Disney+ about the female transition to puberty, as an opposite and superior model, where the protagonist grows up “having friends, going to concerts or learning from her parents,” and not only based on internal mental processes, such as those narrated by the two Inside Out films so far. “In the end, these are the things that make us think of therapy not as a way of adjusting to the circumstances of the world, but as something we have to cook and eat alone. Do you have problems? Don’t talk to people, go to a psychologist instead.”
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