Episode 107 - Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015) (with Eric Herhuth)
Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
The problematic pursuit of happiness is the focus of Episode 107 of the podcast, which looks at the pleasure of the mindscape in Pixar Animation Studios’ computer-animated film Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015). Joining Chris and Alex for this cerebral trip inside the mind is Dr Eric Herhuth, Assistant Professor of Communication and Director of Film Studies at Tulane University, and author of a number of publications on the intersections between animation, aesthetics, and politics, including the monograph Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling, and Digital Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). Topics for this episode include contemporary Hollywood animation and the place of Inside Out within Pixar’s Golden Age; animation’s longstanding propensity for metaphor and political allegory; emotion, personality, and the U.S. obsession with happiness; the politics and creativity of ruined spaces and Inside Out’s linking of agency with repression; the 11-year-old Riley as both protagonist and setting (and the subsequent gendering of the film’s virtual space); what Inside Out is saying about the acceptance of sadness; and the dramatic stakes of what happens when feelings have feelings.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Suggested Readings
Bazin, André, 1997. Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews From the Forties and Fifties. London and New York: Routledge.
Herhuth, Eric. 2016. “The Politics of Animation and the Animation of Politics,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 11, no.1 (March): 4–22.
Herhuth, Eric. 2014. “Life, Love, and Programming: The Culture and Politics of WALL-E and Pixar Computer-Animation.” Cinema Journal 53, no. 4 (Summer): 53–75.
Herhuth, Eric. 2017. Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling, and Digital Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Highmore, Ben. 2013. “Playgrounds and Bombsites: Postwar Britain’s Ruined Landscapes.” Cultural Politics 9, no. 3: 323-336.