Inside Out, Upside Down or Sideways, Pixar's Latest is An 'Emotional' Thrill Ride!

Rating: 10/10 (25 August 2015)

It's old hat to call a movie an "emotional thrill ride," but in Inside Out, it's literally true, as the abstract concepts of our minds prove to be the perfect playground for the Pixar pixelators.
The opening scenes of Inside Out skillfully introduce the characters while generating a sense of joy at the wonders of the world, as a little girl named Riley is born in Minnesota and starts to grow. But unlike other animated movies, Riley is not the hero of the film. The principal characters are the primary emotions in her head: permanently buoyant, yellow-hued emoticon-Tinkerbell hybrid – Joy; fiery red, pugnacious, his fuse as short as his sleeves – Anger; bespectacled blue blob beneath owlish spectacles – Sadness; chic, fastidious and disdainful green - Disgust and a bow-tie wearing purplish bag-of-nerves with startled eyebrows that levitate above his head - Fear. Together they guide Riley's feelings from a knob-laden control desk, processing her new memories as they arrive at the Head-quarters, each memory looking like a glowing bowling ball and colored according to mood. Some of her experiences become important, influential long-term memories and are stored as color-coded orbs; others are dumped into the vast wasteland of forgotten experiences.
In the idyll of childhood, it's the ever ebullient Joy, naturally, who takes the lead at the console. But childhood bliss cannot last forever. Riley is uprooted from Minnesota to San Francisco when her father takes another job and the turmoil of the move to a new home leaves Riley coping with everything from living in a less-than-desirable neighborhood to missing her friends to feeling like an outcast at her new school. Things are getting complicated inside Riley Central! This soon triggers a crisis as a control-room malfunction leaves Joy and Sadness stranded in a vast allegorical geography of Riley's mind-scape. And so begins an odyssey through her psyche, as they traverse such wonderfully rendered obstacles as a library of memory banks and an imaginary friend - unbearably tragi-cute Bing Bong. Can Joy and Sadness make it back to headquarters in time, before a dejected Riley runs away from home?
Emotions run wildly funny in this exceedingly original story. But what's most brilliant about the Inside Out is how director Pete Docter not only connects beautifully to those emotions but turns them into his characters. The story takes us outside Riley's mind and into the real world just often enough for us to appreciate what she's going through. It's all done with a deft touch. Working with a multi-layered story and a sparkling voice-cast, Inside Out comes with a surprising amount of depth, resulting in a film that is not only delightfully entertaining, but also thought-provoking and very much emotionally-complex.
Pixar has always been great at coaxing our eyeballs out of our fat heads with awe-inspiring visuals and vibrant colors, but Inside Out is undoubtedly the studio's most impressive piece of eye-candy yet. They outdo themselves with vast, intricate, amazingly detailed landscapes ranging from the "movie studio" where Riley's dreams are produced every night to the places where Riley's subconscious and abstract thinking reside, all brimming with sparkling visuals. The running gags are all delicious (don't miss the end credits) and keep flying in thick and fast.
Fittingly for a movie set inside someone's head, Pixar's latest is a fireworks display of fizzing ideas and bursts of imagination. Poignant, heartfelt, and endearing, Pixar's latest outing challenges us all to dream, to feel, to be!