Introduction
Cinema is more than entertainment, it’s an emotional symphony that grips the soul, stirs the heart, and leaves a mark long after the screen fades to black or the popcorn runs out. It’s Joy that makes us laugh, Fear that keeps us on edge, and Sadness that moves us to tears. But why do certain films resonate so deeply? How do they manage to make us feel as though they were crafted just for us? This emotional power is no accident, it’s the result of a masterful design. Behind every unforgettable moment lies a deliberate strategy, where the film industry transforms emotions into tools to shape genres, guide storytelling, and create experiences that resonate strongly with audience expectations.
This leads us to an essential question: how does the big screen industry leverage emotions to shape the cinematic landscape and redefine the audience experience?
To crack this mystery, we’re heading straight into the Emotion Lab. And guess what? We’ve got the best experts on the job. Who better to call on than the ultimate dream team : Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and, of course, the mADAjestic Surprise. These Inside Out insiders are ready to lead the charge, running experiments, designing emotional blueprints, and uncovering how cinema pulls the strings of our hearts. So grab your popcorn (and maybe a tissue), and let’s see how emotions turn the magic of the silver screen into something unique.
Our experts
Let’s dive deeper into our brain
What resources do we have at our disposal?
The foundation of our analysis is the CMU Movies dataset, which provides valuable information, including countries, genres, release years, and actors.
Additionally, we enriched the dataset by obtaining :
- IMDb ratings from IMDb's official website
- IMDb reviews from IMDb’s official website
- Release year from Wikidata
- Release month from Wikidata
The processed final dataset comprises 11,564 movies and a total of 449,824 reviews ensuring a comprehensive and robust basis for analysis.
Naturally, the most important aspect of our dataset is the emotional part. The model we use for the emotion calculations is the Emotion English DistilRoberta model from HuggingFace. It extracts the following emotions : anger, disgust, fear, joy, neutral, sadness, and surprise from a text input.
We could not have conducted our experiments without the help of some remarkable mathematical tools! Techniques such as Pearson Correlation, Spearman Correlation, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and K-Means Clustering played a crucial role in shaping our analyses. Click on our memory orbs:
What is our DistilRoberta model capable of?
The text below is the Inside Out movie plot. Each sentence is highlighted in the color of the emotion that has been classified with the highest score by our model. The sentences that are assigned no color have been classified as neutral, which means that it doesn’t have a predominant emotion.
In the mind of a young girl named Riley Andersen are five personified emotions that influence her actions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. Riley's experiences become memories that are stored as colored orbs and are sent into long-term memory each night. The aspects of the five most important 'core memories' within her personality take the form of five floating islands. Joy acts as the leader and tries to limit Sadness's influence, perceiving her as an unnecessary burden for Riley. At age 11, Riley moves from Minnesota to San Francisco for her father's new job. On Riley's first day at her new school, Sadness retroactively saddens joyous memories, causing Riley to cry in front of her class. This creates Riley's first sad core memory. Joy tries to dispose of the memory using a pneumatic tube but knocks loose the other core memories during a struggle with Sadness, disabling the personality islands. Joy, Sadness, and the core memories are sucked out of Headquarters. In the absence of Joy and Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust try to make happy core memories, but the results are disastrous, distancing Riley from her parents, peers, and hobbies. Without the core memories, Anger causes Riley's personality islands to crumble and fall into the 'Memory Dump', where things fade to non-existence as they are forgotten. While navigating the vast long-term memory area, Joy and Sadness encounter Bing Bong, Riley's imaginary friend, who suggests riding the 'train of thought' back to Headquarters. Meanwhile, Anger, intending to restore Riley's happiness, convinces Disgust and Fear that Riley should run away to Minnesota, where her happy memories were formed. Joy, Sadness, and Bing Bong catch the train, but it is derailed when another island collapses. Joy, who is afraid all of the core memories will become sad, abandons Sadness and tries to ride a 'recall tube' back to Headquarters. The ground below the tube collapses, sending Joy and Bing Bong plunging into the Memory Dump. Joy discovers a sad memory of losing a hockey game that turned happy when Riley's parents and friends comforted her, and she realizes Sadness's purpose in alerting others when Riley is emotionally overwhelmed and needs help. Joy and Bing Bong try to use his song-fueled wagon rocket to escape the Memory Dump but are unable to ascend due to their combined weight. Bing Bong jumps out of the wagon to save Joy and fades away in the Memory Dump, forgotten. Anger's idea disables the console, putting Riley into depression as she boards a bus to Minnesota. Joy reunites with Sadness, and they return to Headquarters. Riley's emotions admire her new personality islands, powered by core memories that contain a mixture of emotions, and are given an expanded console that has enough room for them to work as a team. Although they admit slight concern over a large red alarm marked 'puberty,' they forget about it.
Read moreAnd if you want to know how our model define each emotion based on the movie’s plots, let’s take a look at these spectacular wordclouds that beautifully align with our experts shapes:
How are our movies classified?
Intuitively, we would all think that movie emotions are closely tied to the film's genre. So, we’d like to see how emotions are conveyed based on genres. Let’s first take a look at how many genres we have at our disposal!
Surprise is right, to simplify this complex view, we grouped genres into broader categories, making trends easier to study and interpret.
You're probably wondering why our experts rushed to analyze genres when our main focus is emotions. Well, let them clarify it and shed light on the correlation between genres and emotions.
Correlation between genres and emotions
If you’re curious about what this figure is, we're here to elucidate the mystery. This is a heatmap, each i-th row of emotion and j-th column genre corresponds to the correlation between both. Therefore, it reveals how each emotion naturally aligns with specific film genres based on the narratives present in the plots.
Each emotion instinctively knows where it can shine, and where it must fade, orchestrating the cinema to illuminate the greatest scenes.
Additionally, the p-values confirm that the strong, positive, or negative correlations observed in the heatmap are not merely intuitive but statistically significant. They also reveal non existent emotion-genre relationships (p ≥ 0.05, near-zero correlations), showing that some emotions remain foreign to specific genres, although less pronounced than if the correlation were negative.
This suggests that the emotions audiences commonly associate with certain genres are not always directly conveyed through the plots or film narratives but instead emerge from how viewers perceive and interpret the stories thanks to the filmmaker jobs.
Emotion distribution of movie plots across genres
Alright, now that we are sure the we have a rock-solid foundation for our analysis, it’s time we dived into the fun part : exploring how emotions are sprinkled across different genres. Let’s see where Joy, Fear, and all their buddies decide to hang out!