Unmarked Inside Out spoilers ahead. You have been warned.
Actually, I’m notorious for trying to make sense of things in a movie. Pixar movies especially. I trust their storytelling decisions enough to always say, “hey, there’s gotta be an in-universe explanation for this thing which seems murky at first glance.” If you asked me about the Watsonian Versus Doylist trope, I’d tell you that I fall firmly on the Watsonian side of things.
That said, I really have trouble making sense of some of Inside Out’s plot points. And while some are bad enough that I would go so far and call them “plot holes,” others just get me a bit (or a bit more) confused. And I decided to just list them all to get them off my chest. I’m not trying to be “contrary” here or anything; in fact, I’d be extremely happy if anyone could give me an in-universe explanation for anything on this list (read: something that’s actually in the movie and not just “theoretically possible”).
Plot holes:
- Why didn’t Joy send the Core Memories back after the gum commercial memory? Not leaving them out of her sight couldn’t have been it – she gave them to Bing Bong, after all, and there’s just no way she’d trust him with them more than three people she spent all eleven years of her life with. Yeah, she might’ve been afraid that the others could taint memories the same way Sadness had, but the movie gave no indication whatsoever that she might be thinking that.
The bad thing here is that this would’ve taken only about half a minute to be resolved. (Sadness: “Oh, oh, Joy, we could send the Core Memories up to Headquarters like this!” Joy: “No way, because reason X! Hey, does anyone know how to get to Friendship Island?” Sadness: *frowns*) But the fact that this was just completely ignored makes it my #1 Inside Out plot hole. - Why could Joy and Sadness leave Headquarters via the tube but Fear couldn’t? If the tube physically prevented him from leaving, then how could Joy and Sadness get sucked into it in the first place?
- Why didn’t the camera’s reality distortion filter work on Bing Bong? It distorted everything the camera was aimed at – why not him? And for that matter, what was the point to that when the only consequence was Fear going “Bing Bong?!” and then it was never important again? (Note that Fear does mention Bing Bong in his frantic babbling about the dream, but Anger and Disgust ignore him completely, so yeah.)
Headscratchers:
- Joy rewinds the hockey team memory to before the point at which it started the first time. If you can rewind memories to before their starting point and can even make them display a different emotion that way, then why are they separated in the first place?
- Why did the rocket survive the long fall down to the dump, but broke on the small one on the way back, when Joy was just a few feet above the ground? And on that note, why did Bing Bong sacrifice himself instead of suggesting that Joy should go ahead and then send the rocket back down? Yeah, there wouldn’t have been time, but not even trying makes it look as if he gave up too soon.
- Why didn’t Joy fade the same way Bing Bong did? What were the rules for fading?
- Why aren’t anyone else’s memories dual-colored? Okay, to not give it away. But is there an explanation that makes sense in context?
- Why doesn’t anyone have qualms about killing the inhabitants of Riley’s mind? Joy and Bing Bong casually murder two Cloud Town people, and the boyfriend generator, oh my…
- Why weren’t there less Core Memories? While it’s nice to know those things are important to Riley, at least the glossed over Friendship Island/Meg storyline could have been cut with no damage whatsoever to the plot. And all we got for Hockey Island was “I like it because X, I quit, I play it again, the end.”
- Why did Joy and Sadness talk about “waking Riley up by scaring her” as if they didn’t realize that it wouldn’t happen by itself? They had to have known that it was actually Fear who had to wake her up by operating the console, because, since Anger growled “He did it again!” it means that Fear had woken everyone up in the middle of the night before, and Joy and Sadness had been in Headquarters then. So why the odd choice of wording? Why not say “we have to make Fear wake her up?” And why not acknowledge that the plan would’ve been doomed if it had been Anger or Disgust on Dream Duty that night?
- If Sadness can fly over the memory dump on her cloud, why didn’t she and Joy try to use that? Yeah, Joy destroyed that cloud when she touched it, but that was a darned high velocity. And if that was actually a Cloud Town cloud, that makes it even worse – they could’ve just grabbed a couple of clouds, flown over to Headquarters, and gotten back in.
- Joy finding Sadness via the tainted memories was a huge stretch. One, she’d already tainted many of them on their first trip through Long Term Memory, and two, Joy specifically remembered that she had done that while getting dragged, so it didn’t make much sense to assume she’d also do it while walking herself. Not to mention that Joy might have been following the trail in the wrong direction. Of course, that she did come across Sadness eventually could have been purely by chance, but that would actually be worse because the problem would have been resolved by a huge coincidence then.
- That Joy closed the Recall Tube doesn’t make much sense to me. If it was about the “tainting” of the memories, Sadness would just have had to wait a bit before she followed Joy – especially because they’ve gone through a tube after each other when they first left Headquarters, too, and nothing happened to the memories then. And if it wasn’t about the memories at all, but about leaving Sadness behind to keep Riley happy, then Joy just ignored everything she had learned on the trip up to that point, which undermines all the buildup for her realization in the memory dump.
- If the mind workers could just get into Headquarters in the epilogue, then why is returning there such a big deal for Joy and Sadness? (But at least for this one, I realize that it would make sense for that to be safer if the Islands aren’t currently in the process of collapsing. Still seems a little jarring, though.)
So. Any thoughts on these?
UntoldStories113 