Pixar’s Inside Out as a Critique of Disney: Self-alienation and the Culture Industry

The critique of Disney from Inside Out

As the film title indicates, Inside Out aims to reveal the mental working and emotion-informed actions of the animated characters. The constant switch between the outside reality of Riley and her mental scape is meant to show us the effect of the internal decision making. On the outside, Riley’s life is normal. She has loving parents, plays hockey, and goes to school. But, on the inside, she goes through the most chaotic times ever since her family relocated from Minnesota to San Francisco. To show the inner working of Riley, the film focuses on the five emotion characters: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, who monitor Riley in the Headquarters (Riley’s conscious mind), and collectively decide on how she would react to external stimulations and direct her actions through a console full of buttons and levers.

Interestingly, by demonstrating how the emotion character makes decisions and directs actions for Riley, Inside Out rehearses the essence of Disney animation. In The Illusion of Life, Thomas and Johnston (1980: 10) define Disney character animation as having ‘a special ingredient . . . that produces drawings that appear to think and make decisions and act of their own volition; it is what creates the illusion of life’. Inside Out literally presents Riley, a human character, who is constantly in the processes of thinking and making decisions, and acting on her own. However, the real point of Disney character animation is to make the character engage the audience emotionally:

If we succeed in [making the audience feel the emotions of the characters], the audience will now care about the character and about what happens to him, and that is audience involvement. Without it, a cartoon feature will never hold the attention of its viewers. (Thomas and Johnston, 1980: 22)

To make the audience care about the character, the animator must first care about the character very deeply. Thomas and Johnston emphasize that the animator’s ‘love for the character is reflected in the finished pictures, for there is an inspired quality that never would exist if it had been put together mechanically from the storyboards’ (p.398). In the film, all the emotion characters adore Riley, and they devote their life to her well-being. It is as if the emotion characters in Inside Out are doing the exact same thing the good Disney animator needs to do. The authors also describe a collaborative process to develop ‘great characters’: the animator needs to discuss and keep on ‘kicking an idea around’ and continually observing and thinking and watching each other act out the business (p.398). Again, the emotion characters in Inside Out are like the Disney animators in that they constantly have open discussions about what to do with Riley’s present situation, and eventually one emotion will step up to make the call. By pushing a particular button, one emotion character can instantly direct Riley to act a certain way, just like the computer animator who manipulates the digital tools to achieve a desired outcome. Therefore, emotion characters in Inside Out are not only there to rehearse the art and processes of Disney animation, but also the stand-in for the Pixar animators themselves for a deeper reflection on the essence of the Disney animation art.

In turn, Inside Out uses Disney animation art as a springboard to launch a sharp critique of Disney’s normalcy of happiness. And this is primarily achieved through the character design of Joy, the leader of the five emotions. Joy is fiercely optimistic and highly spirited. Her body glows and she wears a green dress—which resembles Tinker Bell from Disney’s Peter Pan (1953). Joy is as aggressive as Disney, too. She always thinks positively, micromanages everyone and would never admit that she is in fact upset. Contrary to Joy, Sadness is pudgy and reserved. She wears a sweater and glasses, but she always speaks her pessimistic mind honestly, without the fear of being shunned by others. Sadness is special because as often in the Disney universe, a pessimistic character like her can only exist as a sidekick, whose only purpose is to lighten the mood up. As Joy witnesses how Sadness comforts Bing Bong (Riley’s imaginary friend) without pressuring him to forget his pains, Joy realizes the power of emotional honesty.

The film’s critique of Disney’s normalcy of happiness also extends to Disney’s theme parks, which the company celebrates as ‘the happiest place on earth.’ In the film, the inner world of Riley is portrayed as a colorful theme park, with running trains and boastful sculptures for each ‘Personality Island,’ such as Family, Hockey, Friendship and Goof. As discussed earlier, Pixar is fully aware of how sequels are pivotal to promote Disney’s park attendance. The reference is therefore a subtle protest against Disney’s aggressive monetization of animation.

Nevertheless, the film’s critique of Disney parks is more than just a protest. Specifically, its critique is three-fold: the veiling of labor, excessive emotional labor, and the lack of imagination. First, Riley’s theme park is teeming with technicians, construction workers, and transporters. In contrast, in Disney theme parks, workers and drivers are not supposed to be seen by visitors. As Alexander Wilson (1994) explains:

Almost all of the workings of Disney World are hidden from the spectator, much as productive forces are concealed in the image of the commodity. Miles of underground corridors—‘utilidors’ in Disney parlance—transport workers, supplies, utilities, and telecommunications to the various parts of the ‘Total Vacation Kingdom’. (p.119)

Meanwhile, the construction workers are much more authentic in their emotion expressions. They only respond when asked and their answers are always curt, without additional emotional labor. The visitors are left to their own devices, quite a far cry from Disney’s self-celebratory customer service. According to Disney itself, the most valuable experiences the Disney park can offer is the cheerful, friendly, helpful customer service, which the company has packaged as theatrical performance. Famously, Disney has developed a set of vocabulary borrowed from the theatre for the staff and visitors. For example, the employees are ‘cast members,’ the customer is ‘guest,’ the uniform is ‘costume,’ a job interview is ‘audition,’ and the frontline employee is the ‘host/hostess’ (Disney Institute and Kinni, 2011: 68). Therefore, the presence of technical workers, rather than performers, raises issues with Disney’s veiling not only of labor, but also the performativity of emotions.

Inside Out also highlights the very purpose of the animation art with a literal theme park—the ‘Imagination Land’ in Riley’s mind. Diametrically opposite to the Disney theme park, Imagination Land has no accommodating staff or scripted itinerary. The Imagination Land is desolate, with open access, and has impossible attractions like lava valley and cloud town. Police show up in the middle of mischievous acts, reminiscent of silent film comedy. And magic is possible if the visitor is creative enough, which eventually allows Joy and Sadness a safe return to the Headquarters. More importantly, it is the real magic kingdom that only the animator can create.

In Inside Out 2, Anxiety, the new emotion character that takes over Riley’s mind, is likened to the Disney parent company. In the scene of Pillowtown in Imagination Land, Anxiety frantically demands a whole room of animators to produce more fear projections: fear of not being liked, or not being accepted. For Disney, it is the fear of not being well-received by the market. Anxiety’s paranoia tosses ideas that offend the belief of ‘being a good person’ to the barren region of the ‘back of the mind’ of Riley. Analogously, since sequels are more like a guarantee of box office success, Disney tends to suppress and bury creative ideas for original films. In the end of the film, everything that has been disowned by Riley finally flows back into Riley’s conscious mind and becomes reintegrated, singling Pixar’s exhortation for a softening of the parent company’s push for lucrative gains.

Still, while Pixar animators raise issue with the normalcy of happiness in Disney, it is difficult for them so see beyond how Disney animation is at same time a guideline for self-management and self-exploitation. From the perspective of administration, Disney animation is highly beneficial. It is very easy to measure and judge the quality of the work vis-à-vis the acting of the animator themselves. Also, since the animator is advised to think about the character 24/7, it is inevitable that the animator endeavors to create animation of the highest quality if they want to meet the expectation of the supervisor. Moreover, at Pixar, self-management has become a full-blown corporate culture. For the Pixar animator, there is no character that is too insignificant to escape exhaustive analysis and perfect presentation. As Ed Catmull points out, at Pixar there is a phenomenon nicknamed ‘the beautifully shaded penny,’ meaning the animator tends to spend tremendous time and effort on inessential details so much so that it requires extra effort to balance budget and schedule for the management (Catmull and Wallace, 2013: 77).

In sum, by rehearsing the art and processes of Disney animation, Inside Out comes to reveal the problem of always projecting a façade of happiness. This discovery is actually the heart of the ideology of Disney’s character animation. Following Warren Susman, I will now turn to the cultural history of the personality culture that has been built since the turn of the 20th century to a specific context of the 1930s, ripe for the development of Disney animation.

The personality culture and the culture industry

Emerging around the 1900s, the personality culture was foremost a negotiation of selfhood in a mass society (Barbas, 2001: 36; Susman, 2003: 277). In a nutshell, ‘Personality is the quality of being Somebody’ (Susman, 2003: 277). Susman contrasts the personality culture with the earlier character culture, which used to be concerned about a person’s integrity and sincerity. Essentially, the character culture was based on real achievement, while the personality culture was more about performance (p.283). It is about performance because, as the self-help books preached, one can train oneself to appear magnetic, confident, popular, and successful as second nature (p.280). The result is that ‘Everyone is always performing. The social role demanded of all in the new culture of personality was that of a performer. Every American was to become a performing self’ (p.280).

The desire to ‘be somebody’ of the personality culture soon fused with the rise of mass media. As Barbas (2001) holds, ‘the corporations, Hollywood, and the growing advertising industry’ exploited the situation (p.36). Since 1915, the movies and advertisements established themselves as the idealized model for the individual to imitate, and by the 1920s the prosperity of industrialization and consumer culture had in turn fostered a strong culture of personality, with the focus now shifted to celebrity culture. Barbas explains, ‘Not only did fans praise stars’ personalities and mannerisms, but they often tried to imitate them,’ because ‘imitating the stars had many benefits,’ for example, ‘adopting his idol’s “easy-going air,” explained one fan, enabled him to cope with “many tight situations”’ (p.46).

However, the self was put in an uneasy position to be well-liked and assertive at the same time. ‘In virtually the same breath, the reader is also urged repeatedly to “express your individuality” and to “eliminate the little personal whims, habit, traits that make people dislike you”’ (Susman, 2003: 278). Already in the 1920s, the constant conflicts of reconciling the self as both ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ in the personality culture had caused great anxiety, which Susman believes to have anticipated the popularity of Adler’s inferior complex psychology in the 1930s (p.279). However, the 1930s proved to be challenging for personality culture. The 1930s, as Susman theorizes, was a period of Depressions, war, and machine shock, with widespread fear and shame for the American middle class (pp.193–195). For Susman (2003), the general ethos can be captured in three phenomena: Mickey Mouse, Adlerian psychology, and Carnegie’s self-help books—all of which engaged with the question of social conformity. As mentioned at the beginning, Susman maintains that Mickey Mouse represented a fairytale-like optimism that could transmute the darkness of the 1930s. As for Adler, Susman estimates that ‘the temper and direction of Adler’s thought seem strikingly to fit the mood and response of the period in American culture generally’ (p.200). In particular, Adler’s theory of inferiority complex encourages the individual to ‘“fit in,” to belong, to identify’. Similarly, Dale Carnegie’s (1936) popular book How to Win Friends and Influence People advocates ‘a view’ that ‘success is measured by how well one fits in, how well one is liked by others, how well others respond to the roles one is playing’ (Susman, 2003: 200). In other words, the tendency of social conformity in the personality culture became even more intensified in a time of hardship. The desire to conform was so strong that, ‘There was a deep current of pessimism in the Thirties about the possible survival of individualism’ (p.168). ⁹

In actuality, the 1930s’ concern for individualism echoes the critique of ‘pseudo individuality’ in Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry chapter as one of the most controversial and misunderstood ideas. Critics often speculate if Adorno and Horkheimer were projecting Nazi Germany onto the US out of their own desperations. Or critics see the culture industry chapter as elitist denigration of both mass culture and the masses. Now, in light of the historical understanding of the personality culture, the critical concept of pseudo individuality does make sense, for the role of films, advertising, self-help books, and celebrity culture did play into the contradictions of modern selfhood and reinforced the tendency of social conformity.

However, rather than seeing the culture industry as opportunistic in that it exploited the negotiations of modern selfhood, Adorno and Horkheimer (2002) insist that pseudo individuality is imposed by the culture industry, not something genuinely arising from the individual. This is because their critique of mass culture is based on the presumed parallel between art and the individual. As Schweppenhäuser (2009: 115) points out:

The core assumption of the critical theorists was that in modernity the emancipation of works of art is correlated with the emancipation of the human subject . . . The increasing autonomy of artworks anticipates that of the subject, and the same is true with respect to their failure. Thus, for critical theory, aesthetic emancipation is not a reflection of social emancipation, but its model.

In the culture industry chapter, the case of popular music is given to illustrate how the art of mass culture fails to be such a model for social emancipation. The relationship between the individual and society, understood dialectically as parts and whole, can be compared to the structure of a musical work. For Adorno and Horkheimer (2002), the problem with the structure of popular music consists in its advocacy of the interchangeability between the whole and the parts for the sake of ‘the leading idea,’ whereas harmony was ‘painfully achieved’ in ‘the great bourgeois works of art,’ rather than ‘guaranteed in advance’ (p.99). In other words, in popular music, the parts have been denied uniqueness, conversation, and tension in the musical structure, which potentially inculcates in the individual the value of forced congruence for the sake of the superficial harmony of society. In underlining how the leading idea ‘creates order, not connections’ in music (p.99), they protest how ‘The conspicuous unity of macrocosm and microcosm confronts human beings with a model of their culture: the false identity of universal and particular’ (p.95).

Therefore, contrary to the perceived attack on the individual, pseudo individuality aims to show how the mass culture inculcates submission to the self-alienation tendency in the personality culture. In the conclusion of the culture industry chapter, Adorno and Horkheimer denounce the situation but also maintain certain hope that:

The most intimate reactions of human beings have become so entirely reified, even to themselves . . . personality means hardly more than dazzling white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions. That is the triumph of advertising in the culture industry: the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false. (p.136)

Despite it all, Adorno and Horkheimer do recognize the individual’s resistance. I will address the issue later, but first I will explore the question of how Disney animation participated in the social turmoil of the 1930s. Why did Disney gain such resonance with the masses? How was Disney part of the culture industry? In the following section, I shall explore these questions in the very art of movement coded in Disney animation.

Exuberant vitality and the Disney animation art

‘Exuberant vitality’ is the term Mariotti (2009) borrows from Minima Moralia to summarize Adorno’s critique of ‘the American urge to be happy, to be normal, to be popular, to live life to the fullest, as endless and ultimately self-cancelling’ as a ‘uniquely American form’ of alienation (p.171). Put differently, the critique of ‘exuberant vitality’ is to show how life under capitalism is so damaged that we desperately want to make our life happy and full of rich experiences. Now, with a deeper understanding of cultural history, I suggest that ‘exuberant vitality’ can be understood as the essence of personality culture since it captures all its contradictions between individuality and conformity, authenticity and performativity, and fear and shame and confidence—and yet dissolves them all into a fabulous life modeled after the culture industry. And, as I am about to show, this is precisely the ideology Disney animation aims to embody and teach.

According to The Illusion of Life, the animator must follow the 12 principles to communicate the emotions and thought processes of the characters. Four out of the 12 principles concern the performance of attractive personality. First, the mechanics of Exaggeration and Squash and Stretch are a special form of performance that can help the audience to easily grasp the internal workings of the character. Of course, if used without moderation, the two principles can create a farcical style so characteristic of the Warner Bros. cartoons. However, with moderation, they can convey a sense of immediacy and thus win over the audience. Moreover, Exaggeration and Squash and Stretch can be used to create enthusiastic and lively characters, who go out of their way to convince the audiences of their vitality in an age of scarcity and desperation. Meanwhile, Appeal, supported by Solid Drawing, stresses the importance of creating magnetic characters. Thomas and Johnston stress that Appeal ‘meant anything that a person likes to see, a quality of charm, pleasing design, simplicity, communication, and magnetism,’ rather than ‘cuddly bunnies and soft kittens’ (p.68). Appeal, when combined with Exaggeration, can exponentially enhance the allure of fairy tale characters who look charismatic, popular, sincere, and confident—namely, the heart of personality culture.

The rest of the animation principles have more to do with machine shock, but they also support the indoctrination of personality performance. The principles of Anticipation, Staging, Slow In and Slow Out aim to avoid any disruption and shock of changing movement. Considering Susman’s theorization of the 1930s as partly machine shock, one can see how these three principles specifically work to soothe the spectator. On the other hand, the animator must contemplate minor and supporting movement with Follow Through and Overlapping Action, Arcs, Secondary Action, and Timing. In all, these principles are designed to create rich, harmonious, and pleasurable sensations, and hence transmute machine shock. But, more importantly, the soothing movement breaks down each and every emotion and thought process for the sake of the audience and thus serves as a great performance teacher for the masses to emulate.

In short, Disney animation strives to create the ‘performing’ character, who is energetic and full of life, with the most complex and calculated movement. The Disney animated characters are great performers, who secretly work up every muscle and emotion to appear effortlessly magnetic—which is the heart of personality culture. As such, the sophisticated, light-hearted, and friction-free animation of Disney fairytales became the template of happiness in the age of fears, shame, and machine shock. Hence, Disney animation is essentially performance art expressive of euphoria and vitality, and that is why its mediation of fairy tale musicals can transmute the darkness of the 1930s.

The performativity of emotion is thus highly problematic within the doctrine of Disney animation, which is exactly the point Inside Out makes. Each emotion character in the film offers emotional honesty, except Joy, who is always full of exuberant vitality. Following the principle of Disney animation, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness do have their own Appeal despite their negativity. Their emotional honesty, however, is only tolerated when they follow Joy’s command. When Sadness refuses to comply, Joy goes out of her way to shut her down. Her command of ‘putting on a smile and be happy’ turns out to be a conformist act and has a detrimental effect on the individual: Riley is expected to repress Sadness so that she can become ‘harmonious’ with society, just like a detail in a popular musical piece. As such, Disney has been aligned with the agenda of the culture industry to foster pseudo individuality.

The administered world of Disney parks

Pixar’s critique of customer service at Disney parks can be furthered and understood as part of the culture industry. If Disney animation teaches the animator and the audiences how to perform exuberant vitality from the inside out, customer service at Disney theme parks enforces that from the outside in. Again, this is achieved by engaging the visitor emotionally with the staff’s theatrical performance, just as the animator has to engage the audience emotionally with the animated character. However, a deeper look into the training and administration of the ‘cast members’ of Disney parks reveals how their emotional labor demands self-alienation.

While the happy, ever-smiling, and friendly staff has become the hallmark of Disney theme parks, it has become a key case study of emotional labor in management study. In Hochschild’s (2012[1983]) seminal book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, emotion ‘functions as a messenger from the self’ and her project aims to understand the consequences of how emotion’s ‘signal function’ being ‘impaired when the private management of feeling is socially engineered and transformed into emotional labor for a wage’ (p.xviii). That is, Hochschild is interested in how the commodification of a person’s emotion as part of their labor can have a similar effect of self-alienation that Marx observes in other forms of work (p.17). Partly informed by Erving Goffman’s sociology of how the individual always performs differently for various realms of social interactions, Hochschild has distinguished surface acting and deep acting when it comes to emotional labor (p.xviii). It is now a received understanding that, while surface acting can protect the employee’s integrity, it can cause exhaustion.

However, the question of surface or deep acting is especially problematic for the workforce at Disney theme parks. In ‘Emotional regulation at Walt Disney World,’ Reyers and Matusitz (2012) conclude that ‘a key objective of emotional regulation training at WDW is surface acting,’ though they quickly admit that ‘highly skilled WDW employees’ may have already internalized such training (p.152). Indeed, internalization is what actually takes place. In ‘The happiest place on earth? A case study of the Disney World employment experience,’ Mann and Budworth (2018) discuss their interviews with the staff at Disney World. They discover that ‘the employees remain motivated by the corporate vision’ despite a general ‘negative opinions of the company’s HR practices and general treatment of employees’ (p.377). It is likely that the staff as a whole has internalized the training program so much so that they can only shift the blame to the HR and labor conditions, without coming to a critical view of the program. This can be confirmed by Kuenz (1995) in her personal research at Disney World. She finds that while ‘Disney’s employees are eager to break the kingdom’s spell, they are also willing to maintain it’ (p.112). Kuenz (1995) argues that it is because ‘Disney’s conceit of theater marshals the creative and emotional energies of the workers and creates a situation in which they are always performing for the company’ (p.113).

The point the Disney parks employees are always performing for the company mirrors the situation of the Disney animator. Both the animator and theme park employees have been groomed by the company itself. As the Disney Institute ¹⁰ explains in Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service (Disney Institute and Kinni, 2011), just as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) is the ‘first big payoff for all of the company’s training and development efforts’ of the Disney animators:

Walt made a similar investment in the training and development of people in the mid-1950s in Disneyland. In 1955, he created Disney University, the first corporate university, to make sure that new cast members understood and delivered the service he envisioned at the unique new park. (pp. 60–61)

Ever since, every new employee at the theme park will be inculcated not only with the glorious history and mission of the Disney company, but also the appropriate appearances and behavioral protocols (pp.64–67). Put differently, whereas the Disney animator has internalized the right way to imbue the character with their own exuberant vitality, the cast members at theme parks are trained to personify the Disney service program with their own mind and emotions. Both of them are the 24/7 actors and actresses performing for Disney, trained to act and think in a performance-based way that has been handed from the top down, with as limited deviation as possible. In short, the success of Disney training programs hinges upon the degree of self-alienation for the employees at both the animation studio and the Disney parks.

Accordingly, the self-alienation protocol through emotions caters to the needs of administration at Disney. As Schiller (2018) points out, for Adorno and Horkheimer, the administered world refers to a society that uses administration as ‘a form of domination,’ which ‘proliferates across all sectors of society, from the sphere of production via the state bureaucracy to the culture industry’ (p.834). Since its inception, the administration of Disney theme park undergirds the performative labor by an authoritarian ethos. Shortsleeve (2004) suspects there is paranoia that historically permeates from inside of the company. The paranoia, Shortsleeve argues, stems from the ‘Waltitarianism,’ namely, ‘Walt Disney’s totalitarian, dictatorial approach to leadership’ (p.13). Quite contrary to the Disney Institute’s cheerful tone of Be Our Guest, Disney’s ‘Company training manuals and memos from the 1930s reveal a different story. Employees read that a “centralized management and authority” must be strictly maintained’ (p.20). Also, ‘Walt was known for throwing temper tantrums, throwing scripts at walls, and firing people without warning.’ Interestingly, Van France, the person Walt first hired to train the employees at Disneyland, was also known for his ‘bursts of temper,’ much ‘like the irascible Donald’ (Lipp, 2013: xvii). Moreover, France has a military background and expertise in managing the assembly line workers (p.2). And yet, Van France is the ‘human architect’ who creates ‘the employee orientation and training process,’ whose programs become permanent as the Disney University (Lipp, 2013). ¹¹ If such a mission of creating the happiest place on earth does not contradict Van France’s expertise and temperament, or Walt himself, it can only speak of the level of discipline and control at the theme park.

What’s more, the administration also extends to the visitors. Bryman (2004: 132) notes that ‘a high level of control is achieved over the movement and behaviour of guests’, and eventually in such a controlled environment, ‘visitors become accustomed to conforming to Disney requirements’ (p.133) with ‘a kind of passivity or pliability’ (p.134). In fact, as Bryman points out, control is the key: ‘without control, theming, hybrid consumption, merchandising, and performative labour are less likely to be effective (p.131). In other words, the management of the Disney theme park has to be totalizing. It is not simply a matter of temperament for Walt and Van France to establish autocratic leadership; it is the very essence of the whole enterprise. The truth is that, only because the staff constantly perform the happy characters regardless of their own authentic emotions, the visitors can be cajoled into willing subjection to the rules and regulation of the park in the name of happiness.

In sum, the self-celebratory Disney customer service is essentially a self-alienation program, and is indeed ‘veiled autocracy’ as Adorno (2005: 201) submits in ‘Service to the Customer’. ‘The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them. It drills them in their attitudes by behaving as if it were itself a customer’ (pp.201–202). The customers themselves become the object of discipline. The analogy of ‘the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office’ is used to demonstrate how arrogantly ‘the scientifically epicurean sanatorium-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment-industry’ impose ‘the prescribed happiness’ upon the masses (Adorno, 2005: 62–63). After years of repetitions at the Disney theme parks, the smile and the expectations take on a life of their own. The visitors come in with built-in expectations and protocols and soon the visit to Disney parks becomes a ritualistic pilgrimage.

And strikingly, Adorno’s (2005) provocative conclusion in ‘Service to the Customer’ can now make more sense: ‘there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination’ (p.63). To be sure, Adorno is not describing what actually happened but politicizing the potential effects of the culture industry. ‘Camps of extermination,’ as an extreme case of conformity, can be first understood with Shortsleeve (2004): Disney’s theatre vocabulary turns out to be euphemism, not unlike the ‘totalitarian regimes of the 1930s,’ masking the employment and management reality (p.15). That is, rather than a simple make-believe device, the theatre vocabulary masks how exuberant vitality results from emotional regulation, behavioral protocols, and the internalization of the corporate vision, which is indeed an administered world in itself.

Interestingly, Adorno’s critique of exuberant vitality as a form of self-alienation can be supported by Keltner and Ekman (2015), the psychologist consultants for the film. They point out that ‘emotions organize—rather than disrupt—rational thinking . . . the truth is that emotions guide our perceptions of the world, our memories of the past and even our moral judgments of right and wrong.’ In other words, emotions are essential to almost every decision we make. However, as Disney instrumentalizes positive emotions, self-alienation deepens, and the inner self tends to disconnect from the individual. Adorno (2005: 65) reasons: ‘Narcissism, deprived of its libidinal object by the decay of the self, is replaced by the masochistic satisfaction of no longer being a self.’ The result is that the individual can develop a pathological detachment from the self and even take pleasure in it. In the end, the more self-alienated the individual is, the less resistant they are to social injustice and political abuse, which provides fertile ground for totalitarianism. And to avoid such a pitfall is precisely the purpose of the critical concept of pseudo individuality.

Still, Adorno never believes in the totalization of consciousness in the culture industry. As Cook (1996: 67) argues, ‘The belief that individuals react in predictable and controllable ways to certain stimuli is held by Nazi leaders, demagogues, and the culture industry.’ As can be seen in both the culture industry chapter and ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered,’ Adorno makes the same conclusion that the audiences always see right through it (Adorno, 1991: 131; Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 136). However, as Cook (1996: 69) points out, ‘Adorno also recognized that making people consciously aware of what they know unconsciously is “almost insuperably difficult”’. In the context of Disney’s appeal to happiness, this ambivalence is further compounded. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno (2002) acknowledges the masses’ search for happiness in the culture industry. Reflecting on Stendhal’s dictum of art as the promesse du bonheur, Adorno argues that because we live in a class society, the masses hold on to the ‘immediate, material form’ of the promise of happiness of art, rather than its consciousness (p.311). Seizing upon the opportunity, the culture industry thereby provides ‘the sort of concessions’ to compensate for the masses’ need for such a fulfillment of happiness, which is ‘render[ed] false’.

Clearly, Disney as a company seeks to provide the most concrete forms of happiness with both its animated fairy tale musicals and theme parks. But Disney’s promesse du bonheur is after all a false happiness. As Adorno (1991: 160) summarizes, the agenda of the culture industry is to ‘make for automatized reactions and to weaken the forces of individual resistance’. Inside Out pokes fun at this automatism. Both of Riley’s parents’ playback stock memory like a mini movie inside their head to regulate their own emotions. Instead of communicating their own frustrations to each other, Dad thinks about football while Mom fantasizes about a Latin lover—both of which are the mainstay of the culture industry. This shows how the individual and the culture industry have mutually reinforced their tendency of self-alienation. In Inside Out 2, social conformity becomes Riley’s top priority, so she lets Anxiety hijack her mind and exiles the original five emotion characters from the Headquarters. This shows how the family still carries on with emotional automatism without addressing the root cause.

At the end of Inside Out, Riley and her parents reconcile and reunite. This happy ending is in actuality paramount to the Disney brand as a whole. Wasko (2001: 222) contends that ‘There is almost universal agreement that this company’s products mean wholesome, mentally healthy, happy childhood, America, conflict free, conflict resolution, closeness, togetherness, family bonds . . . on and on.’ Wasko reads the ‘universal agreement’ as deliberately manufactured and perpetuated by the Disney company. To extrapolate Adorno’s critique, the Disneyesque universality is part of the exhortation of the culture industry to restore the individual to its normalcy of happiness and fitting-in—which the character hardly ever departs from in the first place. As Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 125) submit, ‘only because individuals are none but mere intersections of universal tendencies is it possible to reabsorb them smoothly into the universal’. The individuals here, to be sure, refer to the pseudo individuals, identified with the template of exuberant vitality that the culture industry sets up. And as Inside Out submits, it all begins with performativity.

Conclusion

By rehearsing the practices of Disney animation, Inside Out arrives at a subtle and yet poignant critique of Disney in terms of emotional performativity and administered tourism to perpetuate the normalcy of happiness. I further the film’s critique by demonstrating how Disney crafts a sense of exuberant vitality in alignment with the culture industry, which is essentially a program of self-alienation in various forms. Although the animator may not suffer from emotion regulation as intensely as their counterparts at theme parks do, they still have to contend with a style that is inherently inimical to inward authenticity. And, in the end, both involve a form of emotional labor that is confusing for the self. Thus, self-alienation is mediated through the animation art and customer services, and eventually affects the audiences and visitors.

Granted, a successful sequel also requires creativity. However, one cannot help but notice how the intense sequel production between 2010–2019 does seem to have impacted the Creativity, Inc. ¹² Even though after the pandemic Pixar has started to release more original films, they are not as well-received critically or financially as before. Meanwhile, Inside Out 2 is the highest grossing film worldwide in 2024 and in the studio’s own history (Box Office Mojo 2024). It may be more and more difficult to resist franchising (Box Office Mojo, 2015, 2024).

Perhaps, there is still much to hope for. What Inside Out offers is a dialectical move: a critical awareness of how self-alienation grows out of a medium of self-alienation. It remains to be seen how Pixar continues to resist the administered culture of Disney.