2 movies fit for the classroom

Pixar’s “Inside Out” has enjoyed a tremendous amount of box office success and critical praise since its release, as the Deseret News National’s Chandra Johnson pointed out on June 20, at least partially because of how it tackled the complexity of human emotions. No easy task indeed.

In fact, as The Atlantic’s Daniel Smith wrote earlier this month, much of the critical praise is likely due to the fact that Pete Docter, the film’s director, was careful to research the intricacies of childhood emotion. The result, according to Smith, may be a the perfect tool for introducing children to emotional understanding.

“Last year, after Docter previewed the movie, Variety predicted that it ‘could eventually prove to be as revolutionary as Dante’s "Divine Comedy," which so vividly described the Italian poet’s vision of heaven and hell that it has shaped the public’s image of both ever since,'" Smith wrote.

“This sounds like wild overstatement until you consider that the Divine Comedy’s initial audience was in the thousands, while Inside Out’s will number in the millions, most of them impressionable children.”

Not everyone is as convinced as Smith and the folks at Variety. Two philosophers, Antonia Peacocke and Jackson Kernion, for example, wrote a piece for Vox where they claimed the film falls short on certain elements of how the brain really works.

“Inside Out is a lot of fun, at points laugh-out-loud funny, and, in true Pixar fashion, very poignant at its conclusion,” they wrote. “But it’s a poor reflection of what we know about the mind.”

Still, the overwhelming consensus is that for a fantasy-filled children’s film, “Inside Out” is unusually insightful.

“It's going to be a new pop-culture touchstone,” NPR’s film critic David Edelstein said while discussing the film. “In all kinds of marvelous ways, ‘Inside Out’ is mind-opening.”

And when it comes to producing films worthy of the classroom, Pixar isn’t alone. Christopher Nolan’s latest space epic “Interstellar” also impressed some educators and intellectuals.

Popular astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example, was particularly impressed by the film’s ability to visualize modern science’s understanding of space, including complex theories that typically go over students’ heads.

Now, there’s even a movement by some physicists to use “Interstellar” for educational purposes.

As Big Think’s Monica Joshi reported, a recent paper by a group of scientists (including Kip Thorne, one of the film’s producers) explored the scientific accuracy of Nolan’s film, concluding that it “offers a variety of opportunities for students in elementary courses on general relativity theory.”

“As Nolan worked with Kip Thorne, a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology,” Joshi wrote on Friday, “it was their ambition to make the visuals of the galactic objects as scientifically accurate as possible.”

According to Joshi, the makers of “Interstellar” went so far as to “create new software to model how a black hole would look,” which facilitated the unprecedented accuracy of the film’s look.

While both films are certainly still cinematic adventures rooted in fantasy, it goes to show that not all entertainment has to be mindless.

Email: jfeinauer@deseretdigital.com, Twitter: jjfeinauer.