Emotional Gut Punches

Rating: 7/10 (21 June 2015)

Good lord, people love Pixar. The theaters in town were packed with poor souls with twenty seven kids, grown men without kids and us taking our 5 year old Daughter to the movies. Whats more intriguing is every kid in a packed audience shutting up from start to finish. Grown people don't even do that. (They should though, you know who you are)
That says something. When Pixar nails it, they really nail it and with Inside Out, they nailed it. It starts off hitting you in the face with emotional Mike Tyson uppercuts and ear bites. It may help that I'm a dad to a little girl but hey, we were all little girls once. Or uh, little kids once.
Watching this little girl go through the tough times of life is heart wrenching. It's a great reminder of how devastatingly the outside world can effect the little ones. The originality displayed in how they crafted her mind to really project the many emotions and layers of a human psyche is truly impressive.
Inside Out really shines when they show the correlation to whats going on in the outside world & how it effects the mind and body. Seeing the Parents efforts truly change the course of a life in mere moments is some heavy stuff. The whole middle act however?
Things become less touching and innovative and lend to a more adventure-ish "gotta get from point A to point B before C happens" race when some of the emotions go haywire and have to find their way back. From here we spend a lot of our time inside the mind and imagination. Things becomes more Magic School Bus than truly breakthrough for a while and hey, that's OK. Magic School Bus was awesome. But things did get a bit average in the middle acts.
The ending brings back the correlation to real world and with it come the tears and emotions. As well as breakthrough ideas and originality. You can't help but watch and wonder the many, many places they could go with this idea. The well of emotions, stages of life, different types of people......it's an endless, genius idea. But what makes Inside Out work isn't this idea alone. We really care about this kid and her parents and we relate to their joy, fear, disgust, anger and sadness.
No really, I had man tears. 8/10