my Pixar island will never be thrown into the memory dump

Rating: 9/10 (9 August 2015)

Pixar's latest offer is an absolutely worthwhile adventure for adults and teenagers alike (certainly not for toddlers), makes further efforts to forever change the existential territory of animation feature, it is our generation's great blessing to have Pixar continuously giving life to such master-class animations, which defy the temptation of huge profits from low- hanging fruits, as DESPICABLE ME series and its spin-off THE MINIONS (2015) unblushingly cashes in on.
Anthropomorphising our emotions into five singular entities, Joy (Poehler), Sadness (Smith), Disgust (Kaling), Fear (Hader) and Anger (Black), which reign over every single individual's daily life (not just humans, critters like cats and dogs have them too), might sound a bit dumbed-down on paper, clearly we all aware that we have much more important emotions other than this major five (which is my only hiccup with the setting, especially for adults, more emotions need to be discovered as we grow up, such as pride, shame, jealousy, honesty, guilty etc.), but five is sufficient enough for our protagonist Riley (Dias), a 11-year- old girl whose main emotion is Joy, but now she is experiencing a difficult time when her family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco.
Anyway, this is only a hindsight, the film itself is bursting with whimsical and eye-opening pizazz and it magically constructs a visual and logical splendour of how our brain is working, from the headquarter where 5 emotions work, to the personality islands which created by core memories, to a long term memory labyrinth where memory balls are stalled and constantly cleansed with a train of thoughts doing all the transportation in-between. Then the more innovative cerebral designs, such as the abstract thought zone, where three- dimensional figure reduces to one-dimensional and bespeaks the immaturity and instability of Riley's young brain (a great visual deviation); the dream production, imitates a hectic film crew to re-enact the daily happenings with farcical verisimilitude for Riley's dreamland; in the subconscious world lies our worst nightmares, for Riley, it could be a walking broccoli or a giant clown and finally, the memory dump, where everything will vanish from Riley's memory forever, also a poignant moment occurs as we say goodbye to Riley's imaginary friend Bing Bong (Kind), whose is hoping for reconnect with Riley, but in reality, they only descend to oblivion when we grow up.
All the ingenuity is convincingly relatable for everyone, and tailor-made with what Riley undergoes in her life, who loses her important personality islands one by one, after Joy and Sadness incidentally are sucked out of the headquarter through the transporting tube when Joy is busy at keeping the blue Sadness at bay from the "happy" memory balls. The remaining trio emotions make a great mess while Joy is intent on getting back until she realises she may not be the key emotion to implement the overhaul and save Riley from her impractical running-away plan. The two parallel worlds are perfectly meshed together, the cause-and-effect interactions are brilliantly carried out thanks to a rigorous script sprinkled with grade A humour and sincere emotional projection. And the centre message it inculcates is extremely edifying, we should embrace all the emotions, especially do not underestimate the power of sadness, through sadness, one can face the true feelings and that's what makes us a qualified human being.
I watched the picture in its 3D format, and it is preceded by a 7-minutes short LAVA, directed by James Ford Murphy, a charming love story about two lonely volcanoes with inspiring artistry. One must give kudos to the team headed by Peter Doctor, the mastermind behind MONSTERS, INC. (2001, 8/10) and UP (2009, 9/10). And as long as I live, I promise, my Pixar island will never be thrown into the memory dump, INSIDE OUT is my current best film of 2015 and if any this year's upcoming films can excel it, 2015 will be a great year of cinema in my book!