What this Pixar film gets so right about the human condition

Crossword solvers know ennui well. That synonym of boredom is tailor-made to fit a grid’s awkward corner. A mainstay of “crossword-ese”, the offbeat glossary that only exists on the puzzle page, ennui belongs with other common rarities like alee and ogee and every African antelope in between.

But then Pixar threw ennui into the light. The credit goes to Inside Out 2, the story of a young hockey teen called Riley, or more, the emotions she carries. Out goes Joy from the original, usurped by Anxiety for this latest puberty chapter. Fear gets the flick for Embarrassment, while Sadness defers to Ennui.

Inside Out 2’s new emotions include Anxiety, Envy and Ennui (voiced by French star Adèle Exarchopoulos).

So why not Boredom, I wondered. Why did Pixar pick the crossword-word? For starters, “on-wee” is funnier to say, plus you have the visual advantage of dressing the emotion in Gallic chic, with emo fringe and a Parisian accent. (“Ooh-la-la, Joie is very old school…” ). The film is fun, especially the “sar-chasm” that Ennui carves in Riley’s mindscape, but I puzzled throughout whether ennui and boredom were truly synonymous.

Crosswords say as much, but I was less sold. Charles Dickens was the writer to popularise boredom in 1853, the word at least. Bleak House presents the term six times, typically with “a series of undisguisable yawns”. Boredom had popped up before then – notably 10 years prior in The Albion, an expat journal from New York – but Dickens is deemed the word’s first champion.

As for bore, the noun, we have the Industrial Revolution to thank, a century before Bleak House. Add flywheels and factory looms to daily life, and soon, the blahs will follow. For ages, I’d presumed the verb emerged from the past tense of bear, the fatigue we lug as humans. Though etymologist John Ayto, fancies bara in Old Norse, the word for wave. Poetically, then, the wash of monotony we endure matches a tidal bore, sweeping its way upstream.

Across the channel, ennui embodies annoyance, the two words being close cousins. Imagine a pebble in your shoe. A bedtime mosquito. Ennui is more persistent bugbear than tide of tedium. Germans prefer langeweile, literally long-while, that deadly sense of minutes crawling by.

Peter Toohey, a Canadian professor of classics, distinguishes boredom and ennui via depth. Writing in Boredom: A Lively History (Yale University Press, 2011), he deems ennui to be an existential boredom, agreeing with Pixar’s Camus-like character on screen. Ennui, then, quoting Toohey, “is constructed from a union of boredom, chronic boredom, depression, a sense of superfluity, frustration, surfeit, disgust, indifference, apathy and feeling of entrapment.” Ooh-la-la! Quite the croquembouche.

Boredom is doing double French on a hot Friday afternoon, as Guardian reviewer Ian Samson mused, as opposed to the shapeless dread a French film may loosen. As a question, ennui would be “Why are we here?” versus boredom’s chorus: “Are we there yet?” Reduced to a word, ennui is whatever to boredom’s meh.

This means Pixar chose well. Boredom is duller compared to ennui, the ho-hum of privilege versus the irksome unease every teen should nurse, as should all of us. Why was I born, say? How do I live? That’s ennui speaking. Boredom, meanwhile, just needs a TikTok account. To Schopenhauer, boredom was “a tame longing without any particular object” against the ennui fuelling the blaze of Baudelaire’s work.

As a crossword setter (and solver), I once thought ennui and boredom were the same. Not now. Thanks to the life of Riley, I can see there’s a yawning gap.

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