Archive Episode - Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015) (with Eric Herhuth)

Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015).

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

To coincide with the release of Pixar’s science-fiction computer-animated feature Elio (Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi & Adrian Molina, 2025) this summer, Chris and Alex take listeners back a decade to 2015 and the emotional worlds created by the studio’s earlier Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015). Originally recorded live at the 33rd Annual Society for Animation Studies conference at Teesside University (and released soon after in October 2022), this episode featured as its special guest Dr. Eric Herhuth, Assistant Professor of Communication and Director of Film Studies at Tulane University, and author of Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling, and Digital Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). Relisten to hear the trio discussing animation’s longstanding propensity for metaphor and political allegory; the film’s 11-year-old protagonist Riley and the youthfulness of emotion; and the stakes of Inside Out as a film that encourages audiences to accept both the sadness of joy and the joy of sadness.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Suggested Readings

  • Bazin, André, 1997. Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews From the Forties and Fifties. London and New York: Routledge.

  • Herhuth, Eric. 2016. “The Politics of Animation and the Animation of Politics,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 11, no.1 (March): 4–22.

  • Herhuth, Eric. 2014. “Life, Love, and Programming: The Culture and Politics of WALL-E and Pixar Computer-Animation.” Cinema Journal 53, no. 4 (Summer): 53–75.

  • Herhuth, Eric. 2017. Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling, and Digital Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  • Highmore, Ben. 2013. “Playgrounds and Bombsites: Postwar Britain’s Ruined Landscapes.” Cultural Politics 9, no. 3: 323-336.

PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantCHILDREN, COMPUTER-ANIMATED FILMS, PIXAR, EMOTION, PHILOSOPHY, WORLDSComment