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Inside Out: Pixar’s Triumphant Comeback!

Pixar’s back! I mean really back! The studio’s been in a bit of a slump the last five years with Cars 2, Brave, and Monsters University being fairly disappointing, and with a slate of sequels coming it felt like the once most original animation studio had lost its way.
Well Inside Out is here to remind us it hasn’t! The film is set in the mind of Riley an eleven year old girl and her anthropomorphic emotions in control of her attitude and mindset. Led by Joy (Amy Poehler) who’s always bright, perky, and optimistic, they’re determined to keep Riley happy. Something that’s not easy when her family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco. All of her memories are contained within little colour-coded orbs and special attention is given to the core memories (all joyful of course). But Sadness (Phyllis Smith) seemingly infects one and in the confusion to set it right, she and Joy end up stranded in Riley’s mind leaving only Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader), and Disgust (Mindy Kaling) to run things!
 This film is ridiculously clever and creative! The way the world of the mind is portrayed, how it works, and its various cogs are ingenious but simplistic enough for anyone to understand. There are whole worlds, databanks, and environments we see in this mind that are incredibly new and make perfect sense. Like DreamLand being Hollywood with dreams projected as films. And the animation on it all looks tremendous even in 3D! The main characters are all concepts making the film very symbolic in its ideas, some obvious and some more subtle. Some even just work as jokes which usually hit big. It raises some significant concepts and themes that beg to be delved into and moralistically succeeds big time! 
  The characters work tremendously too. The casting overall is great (there is literally no one more perfect as the personification of anger than Lewis Black!). The film could have gotten away with making these characters purely concepts, but they went further especially with Joy and Sadness who in their relationship with Riley make up the emotional backbone of the movie, creating heartwarming and tear-jerking moments. And there’s a subtle focus on the relationship between these two extremes that really pays off! The only one who doesn’t work sometimes is Disgust, probably because she’s a much more specific emotion than any of the others. But really that’s just a minor gripe.
     Inside Out is engaging, emotional, intelligent, creative, clever, visually enticing, amazingly written, thought provoking, and effective in its ideas for viewers of any age. It's a perfect Pixar film, certainly the studio's best since Finding Nemo, and you'll be doing yourself a great disservice by not seeing and experiencing it! 
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