Inside Out: Pixar Knows Your Emotions Better than You Do

I’m a fan of Pixar’s movies. They historically have been lively, inventive, and heartwarming, except for Brave, which was more Disney than Pixar, IMHO. Pixar movies are the antidote I feed my little multi-racial kid for her constant dose of Disney Princess crack. Now, I don’t give her Disney Princess crack on purpose. She gets it from the air, as far as I can tell. We don’t have cable, nor do we own any of the movies, but she could name all of the White Disney princesses and identify them on sight by dress color by the time she was 3. I caved and bought The Princess and the Frog just to put a little pepper into that pile of salt. Princesses, mostly White but sometimes Black, are so much the basic fodder of childhood fed to girls, without any interrogation of the stereotypes that go along with it, that a movie with a princess in it, regardless of race, generally doesn’t get my Stamp of Sufficient Diversity(™). With the unavoidableness of the White Princess ideal, I watch Pixar movies with my daughter because beyond knowing that the one in the yellow dress is Belle, she should also know that toys live, robots love, and Samuel L. Jackson is as funny an Iceman knockoff as anyone ever could be.

It is with all of this in mind that we went to see Inside Out, the latest, greatest from the imagination machine in Emeryville, California. In their latest offering, Pixar brings us three female leads, none of whom are princesses: the protagonist pre-teen Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias), a…