Opinion | What This Pixar Film Gets Wrong About Boys

I don’t know if you know the movie franchise “Inside Out,” have you seen it? It’s like —— – Oh, “Inside Out“! Yeah. – Yeah, yeah. So I was watching them with my son, and it’s like this really complex story of this young girl’s interiority and her emotional life. And it’s this great portrayal of a young girl’s emotions. And then you go inside her mom’s head. “Did you guys pick up on that?” “Sure did.” They have this complex interaction. And she’s tracking her mom’s emotions, and her mom’s tracking her emotions, and it’s incredibly sophisticated. I don’t know if it was every time, but it felt like every time a man came onscreen, they were like an emotional idiot. It’s like you go inside the dad’s head and he’s like “uhh …” “Carry it, carry it all the way.” And all the emotion avatars have just got their feet up on the desk and they’re checked out and watching the game. And that’s the joke. And I’m watching this with my, at the time, 6-year-old son and thinking, “What are we telling him here?” Like, “everyone has a rich emotional life apart from you and you’re an idiot“? And I was like, that would never pass. If that was a mainstream Disney-Pixar movie, whatever, that had a sexist stereotype about a girl, then we would not stand for it culturally.