Riley Anderson[1] is a major character in the Pixar film Inside Out. She is an 11-year-old girl who loves hockey and other sports. Riley was uprooted from her happy and simple life in Minnesota and taken to San Francisco, California, where she experiences various changes in her life. Her emotions Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger help her through this tough time. She is voiced by Kaitlyn Dias.
Background
Personality
Riley's emotions contribute to her primary behavior in the film. Overall, Riley is upbeat, honest, and goofy when she is content. However, at adolescence, Riley becomes more sentimental and uncertain of herself as her other emotions begin appearing. By the time her family moves to San Francisco, she starts to be more troubled, irked, and lonely. Her emotions at this point try to help her get adjusted to the new life. Riley can second-guess herself, but she doesn't always repent her actions.
Riley really misses Minnesota and is unable to cope with the transition. However, Riley fears letting her parents know she's upset since they want her to accept the new home and that she has always been their "happy girl". As time goes on however, Riley becomes emotionally vulnerable, entering a sort of apathetic depression and coming to the point where she tries to run away, almost losing herself in the process. But it is here she realizes she had almost given up on the things that matter most to her in life and realizes the risk just in time. Returning home and admitting to her parents that she's greatly depressed, she learns to accept San Francisco when her parents comfort her over the personal loss, and Riley (with the guide of her emotions) eventually adapts to her new home.
Physical appearance
Riley is a young girl who has a slender body structure, shoulder-length dirty-blonde hair, blue eyes and gap teeth.
Riley is seen wearing a different outfit on a daily basis. When first shown in the teaser trailer, she wore a long-sleeved shirt with thin horizontal red, yellow, and green zigzag lines, brown pants, and red sneakers. When Riley arrived to her first day of school, she wore the same outfit, but with a yellow jacket. When Riley suffered a brain freeze, she wore a solid pink short-sleeved shirt, blue jeans, and green sneakers. When jamming to "More Than a Feeling" in the second official trailer, she wore a long-sleeved rainbow shirt, blue jeans, and pink socks. Riley's pajamas consisted of a green short-sleeved shirt with blue trim featuring a koala or bear on front, and dark blue sweatpants.
Mind Locations
Her mind is extremely large, and includes certain locations like:
- Emotions' Headquarters: the central part of Riley's mind, where Anger, Disgust, Joy, Fear and Sadness live and control Riley, and where her memories are produced.
- Personality Islands: five embodiments of Riley's personality, as determined by the core memories.
- Long Term Memory: enormous banks of memories forming the main layout of her mind.
- Imagination Land: a place where everything Riley imagines is built.
- Dream Productions: where dreams are filmed.
- Subconscious: contains Riley's worst fears.
- Abstract Thought: a place were ideas (or anyone inside) are simplified to an abstract concept.
- Train of Thought: a train that connects Headquarters and the rest of the mind.
- Memory Dump: an abyss surrounding Headquarters, where faded memories end up and eventually disappear.
Appearances
Inside Out
- Spoilers start here.
- Spoilers end here.
Riley is a major character in the film. Her mind is the main location of it and the main priority of the movie.
When Riley is first born, Joy, her first living emotion is conjured up with baby Riley is smiling right at her parents. A few seconds later, another emotion, named Sadness appears and makes Riley cry. Joy pushes Sadness out of the way and makes Riley happy again.
Over the years, Riley starts to grow up in Minnesota and her other emotions, Disgust, Anger, and Fear are born. Riley becomes happy and jolly pretty much all the time and hardly sad at all. Because of her happiness and joy, Joy unintentionally mistreats Sadness. Riley also becomes one of the best players on her hockey team.
When it is time for Riley and her parents to move to San Francisco, Riley becomes sad and misses her life in Minnesota. When school starts, Riley starts to go from joyous and happy to sentimental and a bit depressed, on account of she misses the good old days in Minnesota. Not to mention, their new house is horrible and the only type of pizza they serve is California pizza. Riley becomes even sadder, Joy does all she can to prevent this from happening. Things go from bad to worse when Sadness accidentally humiliates Riley by making her sob in front of the class while telling her class about the good old days in Minnesota.
This causes a new core memory to be created, which is a sad one. Joy doesn't want Riley to ever be sad so she decides to get rid of it. But during an argument, Joy and Sadness literally get lost in Riley's mind, the others try to keep Riley's head on straight, but it causes Riley to become reclusive, rude, and cantankerous.
The next day, Riley video chats with her old friend, Meg from Minnesota. Things go well until Meg tells Riley all about the wonders of her new best friend and Riley gets so angry, that she hangs up on Meg.
Riley figures that since everything in San Fran is horrible and she is so nostalgic about Minnesota, she decides to run away back to Minnesota. She steals her mother's credit card and skips school to go to the bus back to Minnesota.
When Joy and Sadness finally make it home, Riley finally realizes what she is doing is wrong and decides to run back home. When Riley returns to her worried sick parents, she confesses she was pretending to still be happy and that she misses the good old days in Minnesota. Her parents confess they miss Minnesota as well and Riley finally lets her feelings out.
Soon enough, things are finally looking up for the Andersens. Riley is part of a brand new hockey team and there are new islands in her mind.
- Spoilers end here.
Gallery
Trivia
- Riley is the first Pixar character to be a location.
- In the teaser trailer, Riley with her mom and dad are eating from Chinese food boxes of the same type as the one seen in A Bug's Life and several other Pixar films.
- In said teaser trailer, the playground seen in Riley's Memory Orbs is the playground from Sunnyside Daycare in Toy Story 3.
- Both of Riley's parents have brown hair and brown eyes, suggesting her blonde hair and blue eyes were inherited recessively.
- Riley is left handed. This is shown when she is drawing Bing Bong on the walls as a toddler and how she shoots the puck in hockey. She also uses her left hand when she is eating.
- Riley is one of the few characters in the film to have emotions of different genders.
- According to Pete Docter, this was done for quick readability, and states that it's "a little phony, but hopefully people don't mind."
- When going into the minds of various characters, the film seems to suggest that children and teenagers all have emotions of different genders while adults emotions are all the same gender.
- Riley's yelling after refusing to eat her broccoli when she was two and crying and throwing tantrums are actually recycled recordings of Boo's shouting and crying from Monsters, Inc.
- Coincidentally, both of these films were directed by Pete Docter.
- Mary Gibbs, Boo's original voice actor is even listed under additional voices for this film.
- Riley's original home in Minnesota might be a reference to director Pete Docter, who was also originally from Minnesota.
- Riley is inspired by Pete Docter's daughter, Elie (the voice of Young Ellie in Up). As a child, she was outgoing and goofy. When she turned eleven, she became more introverted and quiet.
- Riley is the second Disney Heroine to have coulrophobia (a fear of clowns), the first being Star Butterfly.
References
- ↑ Inside Out: The Essential Guide, page 6
