"All these facts and opinions look the same. I can't tell them apart." Life lessons it's never too early to learn

Rating: 9/10 (26 November 2015)

I'm a sucker for any movie that portrays the human body (or mind in this case) as an intricate mechanism run by tiny humanoids; as far as I know, it's a pretty short list—one of the sketches in Woody Allen's "Everything You Always Wanted to Know," "Osmosis Jones" and now this one. A few sourpusses have tried to seize the moral high ground here by complaining it's all about blond white-girl privilege and first-world problems I'm sure if I dug deep enough on this site I'd find somebody who didn't like this animated movie (for age 6 and up) because it fails to adequately address the housing crisis in San Francisco (which, seen through the eyes of an outdoorsy 11-year-old from Minnesota, looks like a grim and dingy hellhole).
Some of the commenters here and on the NY Times website have also complained that the theoretical background was all wrong or the movie wasn't inculcating the right values in our children; I was too entranced by the storyline, the jokes (notably the sightgag that sets up the line quoted above and the one about the hairy guy who looked like a bear) and the visuals to pay much attention to such things. Maybe I'll be able to opine on that after we've watched two or three more times
"Inside Out" is delightful. My wife and I aged out of the demo many years ago, but we were chortling and tearing up in all the right places. The script is smart and funny; the concepts behind the animation are incredible—I'll go out on a limb and say they compare in imaginative daring with Doré's illustrations for Dante and Paradise Lost. (As with Dante and Milton, the symbolism gets a little murky at times, at least for an adult, and I'm not sure the plot mechanics are internally consistent. Didn't care!) The voice actors are perfectly cast—a special shoutout to Richard Kind (our UWS neighbor) as imaginary playmate Bingbong.
One final point—along with "The End of the Tour," this one seems like the only decent VOD rental available from Time Warner at the moment.