Pixar’s “Inside Out,” childhood depression and the emotional stranglehold of “Minnesota nice”

In Pixar’s latest effort, “Inside Out”, an 11-year-old girl named Riley Anderson and her parents move to San Francisco from Minnesota. It’s a stressful undertaking that puts Riley’s emotions through the wringer, yet allows her the deeper sense of emotional wellbeing necessary to become a balanced and reasoned adult. However, buried in the subtext of the film is a message that speaks deeply to the reality of growing up in the Midwest.

Often classified as “Minnesota nice,” the Nordic background of much of the upper Midwest contributes to a mindset that values emotional restraint over honest dialogue about wellbeing. In the pop culture landscape, this dysfunction is often cast in a (darkly) humorous light, the most recent example being the television adaptation of Coen brothers’ classic film “Fargo.” Showrunner for the FX series Noah Hawley even speaks to the repression of the area, saying, “It felt to me like a regional thing, where someone who’s so buttoned up and constrained by polite society, to make a declarative sentence is to risk offending someone.”

In “Inside Out”, this sense of emotional misrepresentation makes for a perilous situation, leaving a young girl, raised in an environment where appearing happy is valued over all else, left unequipped to process difficult emotions when they come calling.

Riley and her parents’ relocation to the West Coast is more than a story catalyst, it’s an opportunity to undo the latent damage of a restrictive social environment. For Riley, that is. To look at the emotional consoles of Riley’s parents is to see the cost of living too long in a place that encourages uniformity and repression. Running each parent’s respective console is a team made up of a single gender, uniformly represented. For mom, the team leader is Sadness. For dad, Anger. For both, Joy takes a backseat. While each parent has a fully functioning console run by a cooperative team, it’s telling that they each default to emotions far from the Joy they encourage their daughter to exhibit.


http://www.salon.com/2015/06/26/i_couldnt_be_their_happy_girl_pixars_inside_out_childhood_depression_and_the_emotional_stranglehold_of_minnesota_nice/