Best animated ORIGINAL movie of the past decade

Rating: 10/10 (19 June 2015)

Growing up watching Pixar movies, I got used to excellence. Starting with Toy Story, Bugs Life, Monsters Inc... the franchise (if that's what you would call it) seemed to be impervious to failure. I remember, even as a kid, thinking that I could always rely on Pixar to make a good film. But their perfection in film ran dry with Cars 2, and continued the following two years with sub-par flicks Brave and Monsters University.
After taking a much needed year off, audiences were treated to Inside Out, a story of 5 emotions, given the task of monitoring and directing a young girl named Riley through the loneliness of leaving her hometown in Minnesota to live in San Francisco. After a brief mishap between the prime emotion of Joy, and the often-looked-over Sadness, the two are whisked away from Riley's "Head-Quarters" and off to her long-term memory, where they have to find a way to get back in order to save Riley from her own emotions.
Let me first say that I was initially skeptical. For one thing the idea of the story seemed far fetched and strange. Another, and for me more important factor, was the fact that this film is rated PG. I have always been a fan of the way Pixar has been able to make EXTREMELY family friendly movies and still make them relateable for kids and adults. I was afraid that this movie would resort to making potty humor jokes and slight innuendos that go way over kids heads (nod to the Shrek films). This isn't the case though. I don't think the humor is the reason this movie got a higher rating, but rather the very extreme emotional roller coaster this movie turned out to be.
I'm a huge fan of kids movies having an underlying moral purpose. This movie doesn't do that. It goes so much further as to put the moral purpose in front of the actual story. It's no question in anyone's mind that the actual point of this story was not for Joy to make it back to Head Quarters, but for Joy to realize that Sadness (or sadness) has a purpose in a person's life, and that it shouldn't be bottled. So many kids movies today teach things like "being brave", or "loving family". While those are very important, this movie may actually teach adults something... That sadness, while coming from a place of pain, is a means to a greater end, and ultimately joy.
This is why I would call this the Best original animated movie of the past ten years!