Fix-it Fridays
Inside Out
After seeing Inside Out, I am confident that Pixar has amongst its employees The Champion. For 29 years of working at Pixar, The Champion has silently resented the company's proclivity toward sexism. Each time the Champion walks through the gilded hall of framed movie posters, The Champion cringes at the male clusters of monsters, toys, rats, cars, and fish, each photo dotted with one or two heavily-eyelashed female characters. The night Brave premiered, The Champion returned to The Champion's desk, banged fists on the desk, and cried out "Why?! Why did our first female protagonist have to be a princess?!"
And when the tears subsided, The Champion reached for a sketchpad and started drawing Inside Out, the feminist film Pixar owed the world.
This movie has not one, not two, but three female leads. Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith) and the 11-year old girl whose mind they inhabit, Riley (Kaitlyn Dias).
Out of the five emotions that work in Riley's mind, three of them are ladies. (Disgust voiced by Mindy Kaling.) Between our main characters, Riley, her mom, her dad, Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Fear, Anger, and Bing Bong (Riley's imaginary friend), and then a few side characters, Riley's teacher, both a guy and a girl maintenance crew workers, an imaginary boyfriend, Riley's best friend, the female movie director, our male to female ratio is: 6:9.
So break out your copies of The Handmaiden's Tale, play Hilary's Spotify Playlist, and put your American Girl Dolls in their horseback riding outfits because Inside Out is....
Pixar's First Movie with a Female Majority!
We give thanks for The Champion's efforts.
The story is set in motion when Riley's family moves from Minnesota to San Fransisco, forcing Riley, and her Emotions to handled unchartered territory. Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Carly, her mother, they all have unique voice, personalities, desires, and issues. Joy is a spunky problem-solver, Leslie Knope in fairy-form. She works tirelessly to make every day of Riley's life more Joyful than the other four emotions. She is a "Life Force" sort of role (see Jurassic World) that is so rarely gifted to girls. She moves mountain and earth, leads with ease and flair, but is fallible.
And if the Emotions are fallible, so too is Riley. She talks back to her parents, hangs up on her best friend, and storms off the ice rink in anger.
Before writing this piece, I read a few blogs where people worried that girl protagonist + emotions = period and mood swings. But Inside Out is not about girls and their flighty, uncontrollable feelings. It's about a kid (who like half of all kids is a girl) who can't figure out quite how her old life fits into her new one.
Before writing this piece, I read a few blogs where people worried that girl protagonist + emotions = period and mood swings. But Inside Out is not about girls and their flighty, uncontrollable feelings. It's about a kid (who like half of all kids is a girl) who can't figure out quite how her old life fits into her new one.
There are only three disappointing moments of Non- Pure Feminist Awesomeness in Inside Out and one of them happened before the feature film started.
1. The homogenous faces. A month or so ago, the blogosphere blew up when someone pointed out that every female Pixar character has the same face: round with a little button-nose. Compare that look to the male characters, whose great variety of noses, chins and foreheads reflect the inherent understanding that men can have a variety of problems, desires, and personality types.
These drawings show off Pixar's "women are all really the same" attitude that kept them creating token-lady-in-the-guy-group problem for 20+ years. Since my attention had been drawn to this problem before the movie, it was pretty infuriating to see in action. Joy, Sadness, and Disgust are written with such uniqueness why would their faces look identical?
These drawings show off Pixar's "women are all really the same" attitude that kept them creating token-lady-in-the-guy-group problem for 20+ years. Since my attention had been drawn to this problem before the movie, it was pretty infuriating to see in action. Joy, Sadness, and Disgust are written with such uniqueness why would their faces look identical?
2. In one scene of Inside Out, we see the inside of Riley's parents' heads as well, the scene relies on archaic parent stereotypes for comedy's sake. While Mom tries to get Dad's help in communicating with Riley, Dad is too busy watching replay of sports games in his mind, forcing Mom to resort to dreaming about a man of her past. It didn't piss me off too much because Lame Parenting Tropes are cranked up to 11 for both genders.
3. I can feel the eye rolls a-comin', but people, the Pixar short was super sexistly drawn. It's about *spoiler alert* volcanos trying to find love, you know, as they do. And you can see from the drawings that while the male volcano gets to look like a volcano, huge, hulking, craggle-faced, the lady volcano is a skinny, long-haired, smooth-faced lady.
But that's it people! Other than that, The Champion has done us a solid.
I could talk on and on about how much I loved Inside Out or how much I cried, or you could go see for yourself :-)
I could talk on and on about how much I loved Inside Out or how much I cried, or you could go see for yourself :-)
