We need to talk about how troublesome Inside Out is.

I saw Inside Out this weekend, and while I enjoyed it I wasn’t as blown away as a lot of the critical community has been. There were a lot of problematic things I just could not dismiss.

To start, it really bothered me that it was a story about a white upper-middle class girl with really supportive parents basically becoming a gentrifier. They move from an unspecified town/city in Minnesota to a house in San Francisco because her dad got an unspecified job at what is clearly a startup/tech company. They move into a fucking house. In San Francisco. They must’ve paid $3 or 4,000,000 for that house or a significant amount of rent each month. Clearly they’re not financially hurting. They had enough money that Riley could steal her mom’s credit card, buy a bus ticket on it, and they wouldn’t even notice.



Now, I get it. The movie isn’t about financial difficulties. It’s about emotional ones. But the thing is, when I grew up we went through some pretty difficult, poor times. Within a month I went from living in a fancy two-story house with secret passageways and hidden rooms to living in a 4-bedroom apartment with my entire family in a run-down complex that was filled with drunk college kids. I couldn’t afford to do summer camp anymore and was torn away from my friends and that really hurt. And as an 11 year old I had to come to terms with the financial realities plaguing my family and understand that no matter how much I wanted some things I could never have them. But in the movie, Riley’s parents give her anything she wants.

Now, just imagine if the movie were about a girl who grew up in San Francisco and was forced to move because her family was priced out of their place because of gentrifiers like Riley and her family. Maybe I’m just irked because she had the most stable supportive nuclear family imaginable, who noticed she was gone immediately and loved and supported her no matter what, which is something that I never had. I love my mom dearly and she did a great job raising us, but she worked a tough job and wasn’t around all the time. And when she was, she was exhausted. The kind of super-supportive family Riley has is something a majority of American children don’t have, so at its heart it’s really exclusionary. Imagine if the movie were about a kid dealing with her parents divorcing. That would bring comfort to thousands of kids every year.

Furthermore, Pixar has a diversity problem and it’s really becoming apparent. The movie could’ve been about a kid from any race, and let’s face it, white kids face the fewest number of struggles by far. The only remotely non-white character I can remember in the movie is Riley’s teacher. Number the important minority characters in Pixar films and you get Frozone from The Incredibles, Bonnie from Toy Story 3, and Russell from Up. And only Russell had a starring role and that was shared with an old White man.





Inside Out had its clever moments and some really genuinely affecting emotional beats, but in its heart it tells a really privileged story that belittles the struggles that tens of thousands of less privileged kids have to deal with every day.





PS. can we talk about how deeply sexist Lava was? Was it necessary to gender the volcanoes? And to make them hetero? And to give a young bride to an old man?