Memory Orbs are major objects in the 2015 Disney/Pixar animated feature film Inside Out and its 2024 sequel.
Background
The orbs are ball-like spheres containing the memories of the person they belong to. The Orbs differentiate in color, each one representing a specific emotion - yellow for Joy, blue for Sadness, green for Disgust, purple for Fear, red for Anger, orange for Anxiety, turquoise for Envy, indigo for Ennui, and pink for Embarrassment. They are activated by the Emotions in Headquarters of a person to make that person remember things, as being sent up a recall tube and projected onto the consciousness screen as a home movie.
When a memory orb is created, it appears from behind the consciousness screen and slides onto one of the various shelves. At the end of the day, a switch is pressed which flushes all the memory orbs off the shelves and up the recall tube to Long Term Memory. When a specific memory in a person's life establishes a part of their personality, that creates a core memory, a memory orb which is noticeably several shades brighter than a normal memory orb. Those memories are kept in a pedestal in the center of Headquarters and produce special floating Personality Islands according to them.
Over time, specific memories turn grey and become faded or forgotten, as the person doesn't recall that memory enough. Faded memories are sucked off the shelves by The Forgetters and are added to the Memory Dump where they eventually disappear and become completely forgotten.
Trivia
- During the events of the film, after Riley moves to San Francisco, if Sadness touches a Memory Orb, the memory will become sad and the orb's color will change to blue, regardless of original color. This is most likely because the affected memories are all from Minnesota and Riley is not going back there, which makes those memories sad. If this hypothesis is correct, presumably nothing would happen to the San Francisco-origin memories, since they were created at her new home.
- At the end of the movie, Joy and Sadness combining forces to bring Riley home reveals that two emotions can create a memory. Afterwards, more emotions can take control at once with their new, larger console, and two-color memories become common.
- As memories age, their video playback becomes blurry, the audio becomes muffled, and their color gradually fades. The Forgetters remove the older memories from Long Term Memory and throw them in the Memory Dump when this happens, where the memories will eventually crumble to dust and blow away. If a memory is removed by a Forgetter, it appears to take on a brown color when it goes into the dump, which might originate from the color of an old photo film.
- Some memories, which contain only factual information (like phone numbers or times tables), seem to have no initial color at all and are simply gray to show they are neutral. This leads the Mind Workers to think that they are old memories.
- On one of the memory orbs, the Pizza Planet Truck can be seen closely.
- One of the happy memories contains the Sunnyside Daycare playground, but with some slight differences.
- Both inside the Headquarters and in the Long Term Memory there are also orange memory orbs scattered in different parts. This color portends the existence of another emotion whose color represents it. In Inside Out 2, it was revealed that the color orange represents Anxiety.
- Also in the Inside Out epilogue and in the short Riley's First Date?, there are several memories (most of them are mixed) whose colors do not match the usual ones of the Basic Emotions, since in addition to the orange already mentioned above, they appear in pink, indigo and aquamarine colors; symbolizing that Riley's mind has become more complex and, in turn, also foreshadowing the new Emotions that will debut in Inside Out 2. In Inside Out 2, it's revealed that pink represents Embarrassment, indigo represents Ennui, and turquoise represents Envy.
- When Sadness comes crashing back into headquarters, one of the yellow memory spheres that came along with her shows Elio as a reference to Elio.
- As revealed in Dream Productions, dreams can become memory orbs if someone can remember their dreams. These memories are kept with the dream director who was responsible for making them. It's considered to be an accomplishment for dream directors if they person remembers their dream, viewing it as a hit.
- One of the memories feature Riley and her parents at the dinosaur park, with two statues referencing Pixar's following film The Good Dinosaur.
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