8.4 for shallow techno new age gibberish going nowhere?

Rating: 2/10 (26 October 2015)

A young girl's five emotions try to solve her identity crisis caused by moving, but when the wrong levers in brain's control center are pushed, things go awry.
That synopsis made me push watching this further and further ahead to, but I loved Docter's masterpiece "Up" so I had to watch this in a theater while I still could. Me and my partner thought, well, not really expecting much, so it will probably be OK. But oh what a disappointment it was. OK, I admit we are not teens. And love Japanese animation. And I do not appreciate Disney because of their marketing bonanza and ill-fitting gender stereotypes. But this film is so chock-full of fantasy-killing and misguided ideological messages that I am flabbergasted. It is beyond me how so little viewers find offense with the messages, and that these are thoroughly inappropriate for kids.
Like for instance: 1) You are not in control of your emotions, your emotions control you. 2) Thought and reason have no influence at all on your decisions. 3) If you do not keep your emotions in check, you will lose your memories. If you lose your memories, you will become emotionally unresponsive. 4) There is only one good emotion (joy). There are four negative ones (sadness, anger, disgust, fear). That is it. That is what everyone feels. To hell with love. Or desire. Or curiosity. Or faith. 5) In order to grow up, your joyful memories have to become sad memories. Why? Good question. That is the climax of the movie and there is no explanation why this should be the case.
None of this makes any sense. The whole plot is completely incoherent. These messages hold no educational value whatsoever. And strangely this seems to be more obvious to children than to adults - I heard a boy asking his parents what any of that was supposed to mean.
This is obviously made and marketed for tech-savvy young parents who think they should take their kids to something more "challenging" than "Planes 2". The parents look like what an ad exec at Disney imagines Google employees to look like - mom wears cute specs, dad a hipster beard and it is set in San Francisco on top of that. The whole thing is probably the most in-your-face marketing device posing for a movie that I have ever seen. And everybody seems to be literally buying it.
Well, not everybody. Some of the reviewers here do have similar issues, so all is not lost for the human race. If you care for an alternative story about a girl away from home struggling to adapt, there is the fantastic new Ghibli feature "When Marnie was there". That film has everything "Inside Out" has not: a story, believable characters, imagination, mystery, and most importantly: heart.