Far exceeded my expectations.

Rating: 9/10 (16 August 2015)

This review does contain a few spoilers.
It's amazing how a movie that has an average rating of 8.6 here on IMDb can have so many negative written reviews, especially since it is such a good film.
Maybe some thought that the plot was about an eleven year old girl who is having trouble adjusting to life in a new town, and the personified emotion characters in her head were just a plot device, but the real plot is the arc of her emotions. She moves from being a child with simple emotional responses toward the more adolescent and adult world of complex emotions where life's situations are a mix of joy and sadness, and old memories can take on different meanings through the lens of experience.
The journey through the brain is a fantastic voyage, showing not only triumph and wonder, but real sense of loss as memories of childhood fade. The film is not one of those relentless happy, one dimensional stories where the tensions are not real. It is very much like "It's a Wonderful Life" in that the story is simple and has a happy ending, but has many dark moments. That is what makes the film great, and I suppose why it's not to everyone's taste. But I will say that my warm and intelligent 11 year old daughter loved it, and connected to it. And so did my wife and I.