An innovation in animated features hit the market earlier this year.
On August 25, 2024, Pixar’s Inside Out 2 became the second animated feature to gross $1 billion internationally, before segueing to its highest-grossing-animated-film-of-all-time status on September 1, 2024. The runaway success is due in part to the science behind the film in normalizing the purpose of emotions, specifically anxiety, to ensure that we pay attention to the things that matter most in life. However, without the creative license to explore themes inside the complexities of emotion and the teenage brain, our awareness of the intersection between psychology, storytelling, and cinema may have been missed.
In his Ted Talk, “Laws That Choke Creativity,” Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, addressed the topic of user-generated content and the surrounding issues of copyright in the digital space.
Lessig set the stage with his position that modern culture is dominated by creator agenda, and distributors who desire to maintain their monopolies on cultural products such as contemporary film and music. Lessig argued that Creative Commons provides alternatives to those copyright restrictions. The ultimate goal of Creative Commons is to level the playing field in the digital space by countering the dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture, which blocks creativity with systemic procedures that subsequently discourage innovation.
Inside Out 2 is joyful iteration made possible by the work of Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons, a multitude of talented scientists and visionaries, and a league of brilliant creators.
