Pixar's Inside Out: How to break a hero in 3 easy steps
I wrote about Inside Out's use of set up earlier, and the movie does a great job of setting up Joy's character arc.
Joy is the story's hero, and starts out at the top: she is in control of headquarters, Riley's memories are largely happy, and the other emotions—Anger, Fear, Disgust, and Sadness—are small players in Riley's life. Joy shows particular disdain for Sadness and works to keep her contained, often literally.
This setup tells us that Joy will fall and the story question is: can Joy overcome her internal obstacles to ultimately succeed?
But for a hero to grow, you have to first break them down so much they're left with no other choices but to change. So: how do you break a hero? Inside Out is a case study on how to break a hero in three easy steps.
Step 1: Rip the Hero's World Away
If a hero is successful, it's because the way the hero works fits with the world as it is. To break the hero, the first thing a story must do is rip their world away.
In the beginning, Joy is able to maintain control because Riley is, for the most part, happy. Most of her memories are happy ("... not to brag", Joy says) and so is every one of her core memories. As Joy tells us at the beginning of the story: "[Riley's] got great friends and a great house. Things couldn’t be better." So the story rips Joy's world away: Riley moves from Minnesota to a new house in a foreign place (San Francisco) with no friends.
What follows is a slow progression from bad to worse, and Joy fights to maintain the status quo every step of the way:
Riley's new house is small, run-down, and dirty. Riley's room is tiny and dark. Joy reacts: "I read somewhere that an empty room is an opportunity."
The moving van is delayed so Riley doesn't have anything to make the new house familiar. Joy reacts: she gives Riley the idea to play hockey in the house with her parents.
The hockey game is quickly interrupted by a phone call, and Riley's dad is preoccupied and distracted by work. Sadness tries to take control, but Joy blocks her and suggests one of Riley's favourites: pizza!
But even the pizza is wrong: it's topped with broccoli, which Riley hates.
At every disappointment and every opportunity for Sadness to play a role, Joy rejects it and redirects Riley towards happiness. But every one of Joy's attempts fails.
It continues and escalates as Sadness more directly interferes:
Joy plays a memory of the road trip to San Francisco for Riley, but Sadness touches it and turns it blue, revealing a sad side of the memory. Joy reacts: she demands Sadness not touch any more memories.
Joy has Riley slide down the banister, reflecting her goofball personality, but Sadness accidentally knocks the core memory powering Goofball Island loose. Joy is able to replace it, but...
Sadness touches a core memory and almost turns it blue before Joy is able to stop her, just in time.
Rather than accepting Sadness, Joy tries to change her:
Joy suggests Sadness think of something funny. Sadness suggests "the funny movie where the dog dies".
Joy suggests Sadness think of Riley's favourite things to do, but Sadness can only think of rain making them cold, their shoes soggy, and everything starts feeling droopy.
Joy gives up and instead tries to distract Sadness with giant technical manuals to read, front to back.
As the day ends, Joy refuses to accept that Riley shouldn't be happy despite the mounting bad news. But finally, when Riley's dad is once again called away for work and his stress is obvious, Joy relinquishes control... momentarily. Riley's mom enters at bedtime and says that her dad needs them and needs Riley to stay their "happy girl". Joy jumps at the opportunity to take back control.
This progression of events builds Joy's desperation to maintain the status quo—a happy Riley, and Joy in control—and we see her desperation as she crosses a line for the first time. While Joy is on dream duty, she sees Riley having bad dreams. Joy is desperate to end the day on a happy note. "I know I'm not supposed to do this," Joy says, and unplugs the dream machine. She replaces the bad dreams by replaying happy memories from Minnesota.
The next day, it’s Riley's first day in her new school, and Joy has a plan to guarantee it's a happy day. Joy makes the stakes from her perspective clear: "We are gonna to have a good day, which will turn into a good week, which will turn into a good year, which turns into a good LIFE!" Sadness is not an option, and Joy will do anything to prevent it.
Joy delegates jobs to Fear, Disgust, Anger—everyone except Sadness. Joy has a "super important job just for [Sadness]": Joy draws a small chalk circle on the floor and asks that "all the Sadness stays inside of it".
As with all of Joy's previous efforts to deny Sadness, this backfires. Riley introduces herself to her class, describing happy memories from Minnesota that Joy is carefully choosing in headquarters. But Sadness leaves her chalk circle and touches the memory, and Riley's thoughts turn to her loss of those happy times back home. Riley cries in front of her class, and a new sad core memory is created.
From Joy's point of view, this is a disaster: every core memory has been a happy one. Again crossing a line, she grabs it before it can enter the core memory holder and rushes to flush it to Long-Term through a vacuum tube. Sadness tries to stop her—they struggle, knocking all the core memories out of the holder, and suddenly Joy, Sadness, and all the core memories are sucked up the vacuum tube and ejected into Long-Term.
Step by step, Inside Out depicts Joy's control slipping away. But more importantly, the story shows how Joy's increasingly desperate clinging to the status quo ultimately causes her world to be ripped away, literally and figuratively: Riley is no longer happy, Joy is no longer in control, and Joy is not in Kansas Headquarters anymore.
Step 2: The Hero Refuses to Change.
Joy and Sadness land in Long-Term after their ejection from Headquarters and quickly find the happy core memories. (The new blue core memory was sorted to a separate side tube—Joy doesn't care, of course.) Without the core memories in Headquarters, the islands of personality have broken down. Joy's new plan: "We—we can fix this. We just have to get back to Headquarters, plug the core memories in, and Riley will be back to normal." In other words, Joy's plan is to return to the status quo as quickly as possible.
Through their attempts to get back to Headquarters, we see Joy still sees no purpose to Sadness:
When Sadness doubts the plan, Joy dismisses her and tells her to "think positive".
Any time Sadness touches memories, Joy tells her to stop since they'll stay blue—in other words, Sadness is bad.
When Riley's old imaginary friend, Bing Bong, is sad that Riley is forgetting him, Joy interrupts him and makes empty promises to persuade him to help: "Hey, hey, don't be sad. Tell you what, when I get back up to Headquarters, I’ll make sure Riley remembers you." Bing Bong has an undeniable reason to feel sad, but Joy reacts as she always does: by denying it.
But, along the way Sadness starts to prove useful to Joy. These build the bond between Joy and Sadness as they find common ground despite their conflicting personalities, as you'd expect in any buddy cop movie.
Because Sadness had studied the manuals, she knows the way back to Headquarters through the maze of Long-Term and is able to lead Joy.
Bing Bong sees his rocket wagon dumped into the Memory Dump, where memories are permanently forgotten. Bing Bong is devastated and doesn't respond to Joy's repeated attempts to cheer him into moving on ("Hey, it’s going to be okay. We can fix this! We just need to get back to Headquarters."). Sadness instead sits with Bing Bong and truly hears him: "I’m sorry they took your rocket. They took something that you loved. It’s gone, forever." Bing Bong cries and is then able to move on.
The Train of Thought (their way back to Headquarters) stops because Riley is sleeping. Sadness suggests they wake her up... though Joy promptly takes the idea as her own. Joy plans to create a dream for Riley that is so happy she wakes up from excitement (Sadness: "That's never happened before."), but it's Sadness who pushes for a scary dream which ultimately works.
After Bing Bong is locked up in the Subconscious, Sadness cleverly tricks the guards into letting them in by pretending they just escaped. Joy gives Sadness an approving nod.
Through this stage of the story, Joy and Sadness increasingly work as a team instead of adversaries. But Joy only values Sadness in so far as she's useful, and Joy's beliefs remain unchanged:
Joy watches Sadness help Bing Bong, but she can’t understand why it worked and asks "how did you do that?"
After waking up Riley, Joy says to Sadness: "Hey, that was a good idea. About scaring Riley awake. You're not so bad." And in the next breath: "I can’t wait to get the old Riley back. As soon as we get there I’m going to fix this whole mess."
Joy lovingly looks at the core memory of Riley's hockey team cheering for Riley. Sadness says she loves that memory too... "It was the day the Prairie Dogs lost the big playoff game. Riley missed the winning shot. She felt awful. She wanted to quit." Realizing she "went sad again", Sadness apologizes. Joy promises they'll keep working on it when they get back.
Despite seeing the purpose of Sadness with her own eyes, Joy still can't see it. So when the pressure mounts—the Train of Thought crashes, stranding them in Long Term once again, and Joy learns that Riley is running away—Joy reacts in desperation and reveals her true beliefs.
Joy and Sadness try to get into a recall tube back to Headquarters, but Sadness presses against the core memories and they start to turn blue. Joy pushes Sadness out of the tube: "Sadness, stop! You're hurting Riley!" Joy still—despite everything they've been through—believes Sadness is bad for Riley. And so Joy betrays Sadness: she locks her out of the tube to return Headquarters alone, saying "Riley needs to be happy."
Joy's betrayal of Sadness is the ultimate crossing of the line, and leads to the ultimate disaster: the recall tube breaks, and Joy falls into the Memory Dump.
Step 3: Rock Bottom and the Revelation.
Joy immediately reacts as she always does: she sticks to her plan. She gathers up the core memories and desperately tries to claw her way up and out of the Memory Dump. But Bing Bong, who fell into the dump while trying to save Joy, begs her: "Will you stop it please? Don't you get it, Joy? We're stuck down here. We're forgotten."
Finally, Joy stops. The hopelessness sinks in. Despite all her efforts, trying everything—the harder she tried, the further she got from her goal. And it all led her here: rock bottom. In the depths of the Memory Dump, Joy finally accepts that she has failed. "I just wanted Riley to be happy. And now..." Joy’s lost everything. She gives up, lets go, and cries. Joy herself feels sadness.
This sets the stage. As long as Joy's beliefs worked—as it had when Riley was happy, when Joy was in control—she would never change. When her world changed, Joy clung to her beliefs and doubled down with each failure. So to get Joy ready to change, the story had to break her—to bring her to rock bottom. Because at rock bottom, change is the only option left.
Joy looks at the happy core memory of Riley's hockey team cheering for her. A tear falls on the memory and Joy wipes it away. As she does, the memory rewinds and turns sad: Riley is sitting in the tree alone, crying. She remembers what Sadness said about the memory: "It was the day the Prairie Dogs lost the big playoff game. Riley missed the winning shot. She felt awful. She wanted to quit." As the memory plays, Riley's Mom and Dad come to console her. Her hockey team joins and lifts her onto their shoulders.
This brings Joy to her revelation: "Sadness. Mom and Dad, the team... they came to help because of Sadness." Sadness has purpose.
The revelation brings Joy another realization: Sadness is the key to truly helping Riley. Joy is spurred back into action with a new plan: get out of the pit, find Sadness, and bring her back to Headquarters.
We see a new energy and confidence in Joy, replacing her "think positive" rejection of her reality. She leverages her environment instead of fighting it: finding Bing Bong's rocket wagon, using Sadness's blue-memory trail to track her down, and using the Boyfriend Generator to build a tower so she can reach Sadness as she floats by on her sad cloud.
They reach Headquarters just in time, and Joy invites Sadness to take control—Riley is finally able to feel. Waking up from her emotional numbness, Riley gets off the bus and returns home to her parents. She drops the mask of the happy girl and cries. Her mom and dad hug her and share their own sadness about what they've lost in the move. In sadness, Riley also found connection and support.
The movie closes with Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear sharing a new, enlarged control panel. Joy now knows what Riley needs: not to be happy, but to be whole.