Disney animations have always been my favourites. Mainly because they have amazing moral lessons that are quite easy to pick out.
‘Inside out’ would be my first pick in the midst of them all, for the beautiful story line and ultimately the fact that it was very relatable in terms of being able to express different emotions at different times and in different circumstances.

‘Inside out’ suggested, or rather told us that every emotion in us has a person somewhere in our “emotion room” where they all stay and have turns to control our physical emotions depending on the situation.
In inside out, there was angry, safety, happy, disgust and sad.

The protagonist in the movie was a young adolescent girl, Riley, who was the only child of her parents and had just moved from where she had grown up and known all her life to another part of the country due to her fathers work.
As expected, she was finding it hard to completely accept the change with all the effects it’ll have on her, her schooling and also friends, so her ’emotion representatives’ were finding it hard to know how to control and react to situations.

In this little girls head, among her ’emotion people’, her happy was the leader. She called the shots and decided who controlled and when.
This made so much sense to me, not only because she was a child but because she was a happy child and mostly had happy experiences and memories.

I was sitting, happily enjoying my movie till I got to a part of the movie where we got to see the ’emotion people’ for both her mum and her dad.
In both of them, the same emotions existed only that in her mums ’emotion room’, sad was the leader and in her dads, anger was the leader …

I began to think, it may or may not have been an oversight but I wasn’t entirely sure what message it was now passing on to kids because this automatically meant that a child would mostly be happy, a mother mostly sad and a father mostly angry. Because the leading emotions in everyone’s control room implied the emotion that was the most dominant.

Someone would say I was mature enough to notice that, so I did a little experiment.
I made my two little neighbours sit and watch the movie with me again and when I got to that part, sitting as normal as ever, the 4 year old screams “her daddy is always angry.” And that just proved to me that I wasn’t thinking it too much.

The media is one very powerful influence, and beyond all the subliminal ‘evil’ messages are the very obvious ‘not-to-harmful’ ones that ironically even cause more damage.

Don’t get me wrong, Disney movies are actually amazing and all but you still have to be careful what your kid watches but ultimately, prove to them in your character and behaviour that what they’re watching isn’t always true. Mummies aren’t always sad and daddies aren’t always angry and on second thought, not all children are always happy.

I also didn’t understand how Riley’s representative for angry, irrespective of her gender was male but her representative for happy was female.

But it’s cool Disney, we still love you