Inside Out portrays a young girl’s emotional life through complex interactions among emotion characters. The story also shifts into other characters’ inner worlds, including the mother’s emotional tracking of the daughter’s feelings. A concern arises when male characters appear to be depicted as emotionally inept. The portrayal is described as repeatedly reducing men to “emotional idiot” behavior, with emotion avatars shown as disengaged while a father’s inner experience is minimal. Watching the film with a young boy leads to the question of what message is communicated about boys’ emotional worth. The concern is framed as culturally unacceptable if similar stereotypes targeted girls in mainstream animation.
"Films like Inside Out raise questions about how we portray boys' emotional lives. It just felt like every time that a male character appeared onscreen in that movie, they were an emotional idiot, Ruth Whippman says on The Opinions. I don't know if you know the movie franchise Inside Out, have you seen it? It's like - Oh, Inside Out! Yeah. - Yeah, yeah."
"And it's this great portrayal of a young girl's emotions. And then you go inside her mom's head. Did you guys pick up on that? Sure did. They have this complex interaction. And she's tracking her mom's emotions, and her mom's tracking her emotions, and it's incredibly sophisticated. I don't know if it was every time, but it felt like every time a man came onscreen, they were like an emotional idiot."
"It's like you go inside the dad's head and he's like uhh Carry it, carry it all the way. And all the emotion avatars have just got their feet up on the desk and they're checked out and watching the game. And that's the joke. And I'm watching this with my, at the time, 6-year-old son and thinking, What are we telling him here? Like, everyone has a rich emotional life apart from you and you're an idiot?"
"And I was like, that would never pass. If that was a mainstream Disney-Pixar movie, whatever, that had a sexist stereotype about a girl, then we would not stand for it culturally. Films like Inside Out raise questions about how we portray boys' emotional lives."
#gender-stereotypes #boys-emotional-development #animated-film #emotional-representation #pixardisney
Read at www.nytimes.com
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