I finally got round to watching Inside Out 2 the other day, and as a father to a 13 year old daughter (and with another not far behind), it certainly struck an emotionally reverbate, and achingly familar chord.
The film is great. I want to say that straight away. It builds on the foundational concepts introduced in the original film, and delves deeper into the emotional complexities that characterize adolescence, offering viewers a touching (and no doubt familiar) portrayal of the turbulent and often confusing journey from childhood to young adulthood. As we have now come to expect from Pixar, the film skillfully navigates the terrain of growing up, capturing the heightened emotions, the struggle for identity, and the delicate balance between independence and connection that define this life stage (although as a film depicting the complexities of puberty, my kids preferred Turning Red, as do I).
However, despite its obvious strengths, Inside Out 2 largely adheres to a liberal and individualistic understanding of identity, one that is rooted in Western epistemologies and the concept of the self as a distinct, autonomous entity. Of course, this is to be expected, it’s a Hollywood corporate profit-maximising, value-extracting commodity after all. Without giving anything away, the film’s central plot device is ‘Riley’s sense of self’ which develops as she grows up; but as a critic of neoliberalism, this immediately set of my academic spidey-sense, in that it was a perspective that aligns with a broader tradition in Western colonial thought that emphasizes personal agency, self-determination, and the management of one’s internal life as central to human flourishing. Essenitally, it was straight-bat Cartesianism.
As I was watching it, I kept thinking of the African philosophy of Ubuntu (detailed by Professor James Ogude in the video below), which offers a radically different understanding of identity that challenges the tired and colonial Western notions of self-hood explored in Inside Out 2.
Ubuntu, often summarized by the phrase “I am because we are”, or “a person is a person through other persons”, emphasizes the intrinsic interconnectedness of individuals within a community and posits that our sense of self is inextircably linked to the well-being and identity of others (both human and nonhuman). This philosophy critiques the liberal, individualistic model by proposing that true personhood is achieved not through the assertion of individualism and independence but through the recognition and nurturing of relationships within a collective. In many ways then, Ubuntu is a precursor to anarchism, and manifests in some of the ideas I explored in my latest book around the planetary commons. The definition of that collective (it is a family? A neighbourhood? A place? A global network? A country?) is not very well defined within Ubuntu scholarship, but I think that’s kind of the point; place (as well as time) is an important relational factor in community of other people, be they near, far, present, absent, past, future, alive, dead, etc.
Hence Ubuntu’s emphasis on communalism and interconnectedness (across space and time) provides a powerful counterpoint to the individual-centered narrative of Inside Out 2. Rather than viewing emotions and identity as internal processes to be managed in isolation, Ubuntu suggests that our emotional lives are deeply entwined and manifested with those of others. It argues for a spiritual model of identity that is fluid and inter-relational, where the boundaries of the self are porous and shaped by the social, environmental and communal context.
Michael Onyebuchi Eze’s book on the topic is a good one, articulating the ethical and philosophical dimensions of Ubuntu, highlighting its potential to offer a more inclusive and holistic understanding of human identity. It focuses around South Africa as Ubuntu was invoked by the Archbishop Desmond Tutu after apartheid in an attempt to unify the country as a ‘rainbow nation‘ back in 1994.
From this perspective, Inside Out 2 can be seen as reinforcing a more limited, Descartes-inspired (and hence very Western and colonial) view of the self that prioritizes individual emotional management over communal engagement and a relational and spiritual identity. While the film succeeds in providing an emotionally punchy narrative, it ultimately perpetuates an epistemological framework that may feel limiting or exclusionary to those who subscribe to more communal and relational understandings of identity (i.e., people like me).
This approach obviously works in our Western world, but it overlooks the potential richness and depth that alternative frameworks of self-hood like Ubuntu could bring to the understanding of identity, sociality and emotional life.
