Inside Out — Not Just For The Kids!

It’s been along time since I’ve seen a children’s show that left me so excited!

Pixar’s Inside Out totally hits the mark.  Not only in teaching us about our feelings in such an engaging way, but with poignant messages that tug at our heart.  It’s about loss and what we gain if we let our feelings guide us. Not a sentiment that we hear too often in our western culture. Most of us learned to suppress the hard feelings.  Sayings like “If you don’t stop crying I’ll give you something to cry about” , “be a good girl” and “real men don’t cry” come to mind.  But this film shows how we can be transformed when we allow our feelings, all of them, to guide us.

What’s extra fun about this film is the science behind it.  Stanford psychologist Dacher Keltner and  psychologist Paul Eckman (one of Time Magazines’ most influential people) consulted on the film. Their job was to help it accurately show how feelings work inside our head.  And how feelings shape our relationships with others.

I highly recommend this, for the whole family. My husband and teenage children really enjoyed it too.  And THAT does not typically happen! If you’d like a deeper dive into its teachings, here’s a good article.