Science as Fantasy: Humour and Human Psychology in Pixar’s "Inside Out"

Like parody and nonsense, fantasy questions the basis of a known reality. Fantasy is a “flirtation with limits of sense-making” and – with a friendly wink to Alice in Wonderland – “the mirror that sucks the body in” (Shires 1988, 267-268). The effect produced by fantasy has also been described as a “wildly abandoning experience of viewing oneself in a distorting mirror at the circus funhouse for the first time” or, in other words, as ecstasis in sense of the Greek meaning of the term: as “standing outside oneself” (Shires 1988, 268).

Disney Pixar’s 2015 computer-animated family film Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015) is a comedy-adventure that explores emotions ‘standing outside themselves’. It follows the anthropomorphised characters Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust who – at a place called “Headquarters” – control the emotional reactions of 11-year old Riley (Fig. 1). Headquarters is at the epicentre of a fictional utopia in which memories are stored and developed into personality traits. Joy and Sadness become lost in this utopia and must find their way back to Headquarters or risk Riley losing parts of her personality. Inside Out uses humour to convey its science, specifically psychology, through the exploration of mental processes and emotionally-driven behaviour (Burton et al. 2019). Not surprisingly, psychologists and neuroscientists were consulted in the development of the film (Ekman/Keltner 2015). Against this background, we query: what humour strategies are used to create a fantasy of science-based emotions in Inside Out and to what effect?