Emotions are worth $1 billion
Almost everyone has heard that there are two little people in the human brain, a diligent little person and a lazy little person, who fight when faced with things you should do but don't want to do, such as washing dishes, exercising, and writing papers. In 2015, Pixar brought "Brain Squad", a brain-based, imaginative animated feature film that shows us that there are not just two little people in the human brain, but an emotional team, including happiness, worry, anger, fear and disgust.
Such a role setting corresponds to the "six basic human emotions" discovered by psychologist Paul Ekman in the 70s of the last century, namely happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise, which he believes are prevalent in all human cultures. The surprise, which is often very short-lived, is a physiological startle response after an unexpected event, which may also explain why Mind Agent did not recruit it.
Stills from "Mind Agent Team 2".
The protagonist of the film is an 11-year-old girl Riley, she was born in Minnesota, USA, blonde hair, blue eyes and white skin, has a pair of parents who love her unconditionally and respect her, in her long-term memory area, most of the storage is a yellow glass ball that represents happiness, there are few frightes and accidents in her life, no one will jump out from time to time and say to her "If you don't obey again, I don't want you", the fleeting surprise is difficult to find an opportunity to appear in her childhood.
After 9 years, "Mind Squad 2" returns, Riley has grown to 13 years old, and the arrival of puberty is accompanied by the expansion of the brain console and the addition of another emotional squad, which is led by Anxiety, but also includes Mumu (Envy), Embarrassment (Embarrassment) and Burnout (Ennui). Their strong arrival shook Lele's C position on the console, as the lines in the film say, maybe people will not have so much happiness when they grow up.
In the context of promoting positive energy, the nine emotions in Riley's brain, except for happiness, the remaining eight are easily labeled as "negative". But such a movie full of "negative energy" has become a phenomenal movie this year. So far, the film has reached $800 million at the global box office, easily replacing "Dune 2" as the highest-grossing film of the year. Judging by the current box office trend, "Mind Squad 2" is likely to become the first film to break into the $1 billion box office club this year.
In China, judging from the Douban score, the reputation of "Mind Agent Team 2" is slightly lower than that of the first part, but this has not affected its expected box office to continue to rise, and the summer vacation is approaching, and the number of young audiences and family moviegoers should increase. And I also found an interesting thing in the cinema, that is, when watching such a cartoon about the stress and various emotions of adolescence, the children and sisters who are not much different in age from Riley in the same scene are basically watching the movie calmly and calmly, and those who sniff in the dark theater are all us adults.
Some people call "Mind Squad 2" "a 100-minute psychotherapy", and the reason why this movie and its predecessors can give people a sense of healing is by looking directly at those "negative" emotions that we can't avoid. Rather than denying and hiding their existence, acknowledging and accepting them may be a more mature way to deal with them.
It's like at the end of the first part, Riley has a core memory ball dyed with happiness and sadness at the same time, which is a sign of the end of her childhood, she will not have so much pure happiness in the future, it is also the beginning of growth, and she will have to experience many mixed moments in her life for the rest of her life. Human emotions can't be simply and rudely added and subtracted, and growing up is to accept more complex processes, including more complex self and more complex emotions.
Accepting complexity is easy to say, but it's not easy to do and present. "Mind Squad 2" uses the simplest story to tell the most simple and understandable truth, but it can attract people, move people, and provide people with the greatest emotional value in a subtle and silent way, which is not only the film of this film, but also the power of most Hollywood movies that can achieve commercial success around the world.
Don't blame "Jiaojiao"
Compared to its predecessor, "Mind Squad 2" will give people a bit of a lazy feeling. Because it almost continues the story skeleton of the first part, but fills in the new "flesh and blood".
In the first installment, Riley travels from Minnesota to San Francisco, where she experiences moving and transferring schools, and adjusting to a new home, school, and city puts unprecedented pressure on her and makes her make the decision to run away from home. Corresponding to her exodus, the joy and worry in her brain unexpectedly left the console, and fear, anger, and disgust took over her brain. And Riley finally embarks on the journey home, which is also the process of happiness and sadness returning to the console with the core memory orb.
In the sequel, Riley enters adolescence, she is about to enter high school, she has to be separated from her junior high school friends, and the pressure of integrating into the new environment and the selection of the high school hockey team has made the new character Jiaojiao take control of her console, and the five veteran emotions dominated by Lele are thrown into the back area, and they return to the console with an old sense of self, corresponding to Riley's recovery from anxiety and panic attacks.
The importance of happiness does not need to be reiterated, but sometimes the desperate emphasis on happiness may inadvertently evolve into the suppression of other emotions, and may eventually become an authoritarian "only happiness is allowed". If the first "Mind Agent" gently told us that sadness and crying are okay, then the sequel helps people sprout an extremely precious self-compassion by accurately depicting the mental state of modern people when they are swept by anxiety.
As soon as Jiao Jiao appears, the film makes a distinction between it and fear, the latter dealing with visible dangers, while Jiao Jiao is responsible for the invisible dangers, those bad situations that may happen in the future. Actually, it's not a bad thing to be properly anxious, and the real effort that people make to relieve their anxiety and make the "I'm not good enough" voice in their head disappear can really make people improve or solve some problems. As if to avoid the image of the ice hockey team being missed, one of Jiaojiao's plans for Riley was to get her to the rink earlier than everyone in the training camp, and then start practicing to add an extra kilometer of switchbacks to hit the ball wide of the goal. If Jiaojiao stays at this point, it's really nothing.
The problem is that anxiety is an overly volatile emotion. To be prepared, it arrives at the console with six suitcases, and it's this kindness that wants to prevent all the bad things from happening that hurts Riley. The fantasyland in Riley's brain was originally used to fantasize about Prince Charming and future careers, but after Jiao Jiao took over, her brain cells were working overtime to fantasize about "100 bad situations that could happen in the future". These anxieties about the future not only kept Riley up at night, but also caused her to commit the inappropriate act of peeking at her coach's notebook.
When Riley competes in the game that decided whether or not she would make the high school hockey varsity hockey team, Jiaojiao pours herself six bottles of energy drinks, thinking that the harder she tries, the closer Riley will get to success. It turned on the extreme operation on the console, and the whole Jiao ran out of the afterimage, directly setting off an orange storm, only to kill Riley's brain. Riley couldn't make the right judgment, she grabbed a teammate's ball on the court, and was sent off for injuring her junior high school friend, and had a panic attack in the break room.
Looking at everything that was out of control, Jiaojiao couldn't move, only a line of guilty tears oozed from his big frightened eyes. This scene is even more poignant than in the first part, when Riley's childhood best friend Popsicle fades into the gray oblivion zone, because we can see ourselves in Jiaojiao.
Growing up in an environment that emphasizes "winning at the starting line", we are good at self-criticism since childhood, and when we have not yet developed self-awareness, we have usually been told that "you are not good enough", and we do not have to wait until puberty, our anxiety may have been welded to death in the brain console C position, with the intensification of involution in recent years, anxiety has become a common social emotion. A work can faithfully present this emotion, which has given the people who are troubled by it a sense of relief that they are "seen" and "understood", and at the same time, when we cry for Jiaojiao, we actually realize a rare love for ourselves.
Adolescent and nostalgic granny
In the film, Riley's brain is alarmed by the arrival of puberty. In the face of the new situation, every veteran is a little uncomfortable, Riley is a little angry because she was woken up by her mother in the morning, and Anger only gently pressed a button on the console, which caused an unexpected quarrel between mother and daughter.
With the development of brain imaging technology, there is now a more scientific understanding of adolescent rebellion: the limbic system in the brain, which is responsible for driving emotions, undergoes major changes from the age of 10 to 12, while the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for decision-making, planning, and self-control, is at the end of the brain's development list and does not develop until the twenties.
The emotion that has nothing to do with adolescence should be nostalgia. In the movie, nostalgia is personified as a gray-haired grandmother who wants to participate in a group chat twice, but is invited back to the house by other emotions. Outside of the movie, my nostalgic grandmother accompanied me to watch the whole movie, and my eyes were hot because I thought about my youth. The movie-watching experience is not the same as that of the children's brothers and sisters, which seems to confirm Hemingway's sentence that people cannot have youth and the feeling of youth at the same time.
As East Asian children, our adolescence often has to face heavier things than failing to make the high school ice hockey team, whether it is strict parents, it may be the pressure of going to school under the test-oriented education, or it may be the suppression of individuality by collectivism, or all of the above. If Riley's adolescent problem is the easy mode, then many of us have experienced the hard mode, and the help we had at that time was extremely limited, and even a more scientific understanding of the adolescent brain was only studied in the last decade.
This has also led to a situation in which many of us can already start a midlife crisis in terms of actual age, but many times we feel that those problems that have not been solved by adolescence seem to be still affecting us, such as the construction of self-awareness, the relationship with new and old friends, and the complex emotions such as envy, burnout and embarrassment that come with Jiaojiao. The value of "Mind Squad 2" is that it not only soothes many people's current anxieties, but also gives us a hug across the long river of time, and the way it takes is still to present it truthfully.
Riley's tone of voice when she says something against her will in order to fit in with her new group, her twists when she wants to please but fears that it will cause embarrassment, and the incongruity of her hands and feet when she walks with the members of her high school hockey team, and the various emotions that are amplified for no reason. The classic line of the American drama "Angry Life" is that Western psychological counseling cannot cure the head of the East, but the common emotional experience between human beings can still touch people's hearts and resonate through good works, and then achieve shallow healing.
There is a detail in the film that Riley's mother's brain console C position is sadness, and Dad's C position is anger, maybe this is the truth of adult life, and it is already a joy to get some shallow healing.