Awesome for Both 6 year olds and grad students

Rating: 9/10 (2 August 2015)

Inside Out is a rather unique viewing experience of the type that you can only get from Pixar. Most of the action takes place inside the brain of 11-year-old Riley, where her five basic emotions-- Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust-- are turned into cartoon characters that cooperate to help run her conscious and unconscious mind. The control room where they operate is thrown into turmoil when Riley's father gets a new job that forces the family to move from Minnesota to San Francisco. When Riley becomes isolated from her familiar core memories, her whole personality structure is threatened in ways that are brilliantly personified by the world of Pixar animation.
The amazing thing about this movie is that it operates equally effectively if you are a 6-year-old viewer or if you are a grad student in psychology. The five emotions are dazzling characters in themselves, and provide a bunch of laughs for any kid (including mine, who persuaded me to go see it after he first saw it with his grandma). I have seen many negative reviews claiming that the movie is too abstract for young kids, but this was not my experience--although my son was definitely not up on all of the heady psychology that the movie explores, he was still able to be completely enthralled by the emotions as characters as in a traditional cartoon. I think that some people simply cannot believe that a movie that is so intellectual can be understood by kids of this age, but the fact is that it can.
On the other hand, in some measure this movie is like a graduate seminar in psychology as if taught by a 6-year-old. We get to take a trip to various personality islands, aspects of Riley's personality that arise out of her core memories, we get also a journey in the subconscious (where the troublemakers are sent!), we ride on a train of thought which is actually a train, and we get lost in a maze of long term memories. And then we get to see how the various emotions compete and cooperate to serve the psyche as a whole. This is an absolutely dazzling psychology lesson at what seemed to me to be a rather high level.
It should be said that this idea of a control room for a psyche has been done before--you can even point to a comical version in Woody Allen's Sleeper, for instance. What is new here is that it is done with such amazing intellectual sophistication, animation, and truly awesome childlike fun all at the same time. Also, watching Riley's battle to adjust to her new home, which is becomes very traumatic for her, is no joke and becomes the basis of an increasingly powerful story. The result is an incredible movie that takes the idea of simultaneous entertainment for all ages to a new and dazzling level.