‘Riley needs to be happy’: Inside Out and the dystopian aesthetics of neo-liberal governmentality

Abstract

Throughout the last decade, neo-liberalism has increasingly been the subject of academic inquiries, probed for its infiltrating influences in media and cultural products. Approaching the animation industry, this article takes a critical take at Inside Out (2015), a feature Disney‐Pixar production, to reveal the way it is embedded in the discursive network of neo-liberalism, exhibiting neo-liberal niceties and legitimating its notional structures. Inside Out renders a subjectivity of self-responsibility and self-enterprise when surveyed vis-à-vis its hypothetical grounds in positive psychology and neuroscience. The result is a subject who has to be happy but her happiness is ontologized as a matter of emotional dynamics inside her mind. It is concluded that, through its representation of mind that comes at the cost of reason and free will, Inside Out marks the neo-liberal, affective turn in the conglomerate.