Sometimes, when I imagine being a mother, I find myself transported, for a moment, back to the beginning of one of my favorite films, Pixar’s charming coming-of-age—or, better, coming-of-emotion—story (2015). In it, the protagonist, Joy, an anthropomorphized embodiment of the eponymous emotion, comes into being shortly after a girl, Riley, is born, and Joy—who lives in a little control room of sorts in Riley’s head, regulating Riley’s every action—immediately falls in love with her. Joy doesn’t need to say it for us to know; it’s obvious from the glow of wonder in her eyes, the quiet bliss at being in the presence of this new being, the open-mouthed awe at the psychedelic strangeness of birth.
It’s a look I’ve come to recognize in myself when I think of holding the little one I haven’t yet met. Joy isn’t a mother, of course, so much as a core aspect of Riley’s self, along with the other emotions that soon pop, , into being: Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. But Joy takes the reins the most, and she views Riley with a palpable, believable maternalism—that is, she behaves like a mother in the sense that motherhood is never simply one mode of being, but transforms, like lava into landscape, over time.
This is captured over the course of the film through Joy’s shift from her early, Elysian awe into a kind of obsessive helicopter-parenting, becoming a control freak who thinks she should determine how Riley feels more than any other emotion, particu.