Inside Out is a creative, even revolutionary film that shows the emergence of the Female Myth in worldwide storytelling. Female Myth was wiped out in Western culture about 3000 years ago, and it was a devastating loss to our collective heart and mind. But in just the last few years we’ve begun to see it reemerge in a form that speaks to how we live now. And audiences love it.
This is not some passing trend. Female Myth stories are part of what I call New Myth forms (to learn the beats of these forms, see the New Myth Class), and I believe they will dominate worldwide storytelling for the next two decades and beyond. That’s because they fundamentally change our collective vision of who the hero is and what she will accomplish on her life and story paths.
To see how Inside Out works, we have to break down its structure, beginning with the genres it uses, since genres are simply specialized story forms. In the Anatomy of Story Master Class, I talk about the single most important strategy for popular and critical success, which is to combine one or more genres with Drama. The genres, like Myth, give the audience archetypal characters and situations meaningful to everyone, regardless of culture. Drama gives audiences the most subtle and complex characters in all of story, and that applies to the opponents as well as to the hero.
This strategy of mixing genres, especially Myth, with Drama is, in my opinion, the biggest reason for the success of the Pixar scripts and films. We see this technique used from Pixar’s beginning in the brilliant Toy Story films. We see it in Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and Up and we see it here in Inside Out.
But in another important strategy for worldwide storytelling, the writers mix in other genres as well. Besides Myth and Drama, Inside Out has strong elements of Fantasy and Buddy Picture Comedy.
That kind of mix makes for a very complex structure, which is difficult to pull off. As in any Fantasy, we have two tracks here: the fantasy track and the reality track it represents. But unlike Fantasy which takes a single main character from mundane world to fantasy world and back to the mundane, this story has two main characters, Joy and Riley, one for each world. Joy is the primary main character, and it is her Myth journey through Riley’s mind that gives us the main spine of the story.
Of course both Joy and Riley are female. But that alone does not make this a female myth. Joy is not a warrior like the Diana goddess, as depicted by the Katniss Everdeen character in The Hunger Games. She is an emotion, and a way of seeing and interacting with the world without fighting. Riley isn’t the typical Disney princess. She’s a normal, eleven-year-old girl facing a traumatic life event where she’s been forced to move to a new home.
Like the Male Warrior Myth laid out by Joseph Campbell, Joy goes on a long, difficult journey. But she doesn’t fight her way through one opponent after another, ending with a big bloody battle. She thinks and feels her way through the labyrinth that is Riley’s mind. Nor is there a Minotaur at the center that Joy must slay. There are references to some of the old Greek myths, such as the Cyclops in the form of a giant, scary clown and a mountain which Joy, as Sisyphus, must climb only to tumble back down and try again. But it’s the way she handles the opposition, and ultimately succeeds, that makes this a new Female Myth story.
Her primary ally in this journey, and the key to its final success, is another woman, Sadness. As in any Buddy Picture Comedy, the buddy is the first opponent. In the mind of Joy and the audience, Sadness is her polar opposite and best avoided whenever possible. But the key to the self-revelation, for Joy and thus Riley as well, is that experiencing loss and Sadness is part of growing up.
Inside Out points up one of the great challenges, and costs, of telling a new Female Myth. The Male Warrior Myth, indeed all of Western storytelling in the last 3000 years, is based on maximum conflict. Female Myths solve problems in a different way. So the question becomes: how do you create plot that is not based on density of conflict?
Many have noted the plot of Inside Out lags. That comes with any Myth story based on the journey. The Journey plot, with its succession of opponents, can become repetitive. But a big part of the plot problem of Inside Out comes from the lack of conflict, especially a building conflict with a powerful outside opponent over the course of the entire story.
Inside Out overcomes this with a number of brilliant story elements. One is the detailing and organization of the story world in Riley’s mind. Story world is now one of the three or four most important elements in popular storytelling. And the ability of these writers and artists to bring the complex human mind to life, and even more to show how it changes incrementally and dramatically as a child grows up, is breathtaking.
I also have to call attention to all the meta elements about movie-making sprinkled throughout the film. From sly movie references to the Dream Factory Hollywood studio churning out Riley’s dreams, the meta elements are not only funny, they make Inside Out a constant pleasure for the adult viewer.
With Inside Out, Pixar has shown that its success comes from having the best scripts in the movie business (which is why their placement of the writing credit on this movie listed below apparently every producer at Pixar was baffling and very annoying to me). For writers, the great lesson of this film is that Female Myth is an express train that’s coming on fast. If you have an idea for a Female Myth, write it now.
Thanks, John, for another astute observation re “current trends.” But also, thanks for reinforcing the mixed genre approach and how to transcend genres with the element of story world, particularly with the fantasy genre.
It just so happens I am writing a script that could be considered Female Myth. Now that I think about it, there is far less direct conflict than the original version of the script which had one of the male characters as the protagonist.
Brilliant tutorial! 3000 years without female myth? It s about time to bring it up!
what is this “female myth”
FEMALE MYTH IS A MYTH! 🙂
…or at least it is in Hollywood who has been ignoring it since the birth of movies in general, though I honestly blame the Abrahamic religions (Looking at you Christianity, Islam and Judaism). All of these religions are completely dismissive of the the feminine. It’s a shame too because it’s only when the masculine and feminine can live in harmony that people truly find their wholeness and are at peace with their entire being (not just the masculine side).
This is a great article, but I would have read an article about that topic 10x longer. He didn’t really dissect why inside out worked…he said it wasn’t based on plot and an opponent like the hero’s journey, but she worked through her journey via her emotions and feelings. I just would have loved for him to give us an example of that in the story because I need to see it broken down. I 100% believe that the return of the female myth would be so healing for our culture at large, and I’d love to partake in telling those stories but I’d need to study the structure because it seems even more aloof to me than the hero’s journey.
I have always thought the female journey is internal whereas the male journey is external…I’v just never understood how emotions/feelings navigate our female hero to a resolution…and I guess what Truby is saying “Inside Out” does is that she learns to accept sadness as a part of life. The journey is SOOO different, it’s like the male journey is you slay the dragon, and female journey is you make peace with the big, scary dragon.
In psychology male energy is active and female energy is passive/ more focused on being present and just being. which is why I’ve always thought books are more conducive to thoroughly explore the female journey since you can get into their head and truly explore their thinking and feelings. I wish truby wrote a book about the female journey, I would totally buy it and study the shit out of it.
There are many good things that can be said about “Inside Out,” and I don’t disagree with any of the fine points you mentioned. However, I have to say that, watching the film, about half-way into the second act, I realized that I had spent quite a bit of time marveling at how lifelike were the movements of Joy’s dress. That was my level of engagement in the story. But, kudos to the fabric animators!
That got me thinking about why this story had failed to lock me in. My list of maybe two dozen favorite movies of all time is made up of stories that rivet my attention from start to finish and take me on a deeply felt emotional roller coaster ride. I have seen each of these films at least five times. “Finding Nemo” is on that list. I don’t have any desire to see “Inside Out” again.
I guess “Inside Out” highlights the importance of two things most screenwriting teachers agree on: That great stories have a great villain (that lacking you pointed out), and every protagonist needs a clearly defined goal.
A story without a villain is like a wave without a trough: a wave is twice as tall if you measure from the bottom of the trough to the crest.
Riley’s external story, by itself, is very slight. She has no goal until late in the story when she decides to go back to Minnesota on her own. My emotional connection with Riley was minimal. I was not invested in her plight.
Joy had an external goal, but there was no opposing force (as you mentioned). Instead of real conflict, she was faced with mere obstacles in getting Riley’s core memories back where they belonged.
I think in the back of my mind, there’s also a problem with Joy not being a real person in her own right. We root for Joy to succeed not for herself, but for Riley. Joy (and all the other emotions) are subservient creatures; we have no hopes for them as individuals.
It’s a very good movie, imaginative, complicated, well-thought-out. The dream sequence was hysterical. The movie was (at least for me) just not great. And I was hoping for it to be great.
I agree with a lot of the points you make. I didn’t find myself invested in Riley’s journey. Though I wonder if it’s because as an adult the trauma of moving isn’t that dramatic to me as it would be to a child, so I logically am dismissive of it rather than sympathetic with it. I wonder if the movie would have been improved upon if the sadness was due to the death of a loved on, like a grandma or someone Riley loved if I would have been more invested because that kind of sadness and grief is something that doesn’t make sense, so really the only thing you can do to overcome it is to accept it and work through it.
I don’t think all movies need to have a super villain to make a great story. One of my favorite movies is Lars and the Real Girl and there’s no strong villain, but it’s Lars’ emotional journey that I’m personally invested in. With “Inside Out” I just wasn’t that invested in Riley’s personal journey.
Thank you John for this insightful review. The Inside Out concept reminded me of the 1999 film Being John Malkovich with a Female Myth twist. When I see stories of this creative caliber and magnitude I can’t help but feel like my work is terrible. Once again Pixar has raised the bar, I can barely keep up. Thank you John for all your help.
To add to discussion, I think there are some invaluable opportunities in deconstructing the plot here, because it requires the emotional intelligence to join the dots in a negotiation between the emotion characters. To me this seems very similar to plotting the internal track of any story’s hero – an understanding of how the emotions logically flow from one to the next, culminating in the self-revelation and new equilibrium.
Also, if you think about it, only Joy could have been the happy emotion at the end – the others had to remain in as they started or else it a calm Anger or a relaxed Fear or an ecstatic Sadness wouldn’t have made any sense. So the group were necessarily not a happy group, it just appeared that they were.
Likewise, anyone notice that this story presented a unique challenge in organizing a DOUBLED 7 steps? 7 for Joy in a quest to happily resolve the 7 for Riley, continuously interweaving to make one coherent and easy-to-follow story? What a challenge!
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