Movie Review: 'Inside Out'

This family-friendly Pixar gem sends a little girl's feelings on a emotional rescue mission, writes Kavish Chetty

Meet 11-year-old Riley, just as her family is about to relocate to the steep streets of San Francisco. Behind the wide portals of her milky eyes lies the vast landscape of her consciousness, brought to vivid, candy-coloured life by the Pixar animators.

We swoop into her head, where the floating islands of her personality resemble elaborate theme parks, a literal train of thought chugs on a rail above a black abyss of forgotten memories, and her five personified Feelings help her navigate the trials of life from behind a dashboard of buttons and dials. They are: Joy (Amy Poehler), an exuberant yellow sprite, Sadness (Phyllis Smith), a bespectacled blue blob of despair, Fear (Bill Hader), a spineless purple thing prone to tremors of anxiety, Anger (Lewis Black) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling).

Inside Out is a tour of the inner machineries and apparatuses of being, and the most imaginative of the children's epics Pixar has given us in a while.

Animated movies are generally immune to criticism. Film critics, like anyone else, are teleported along a vein of time-travelling nostalgia to a calmer age, when the boundaries of reality dissolve and playfulness is the ordering principle. Inside Out charts the unexplored territory that lies beneath the rim of the self, with all the harmless curiosity one would expect from a kids' film.

When Riley and her parents move away from Minnesota, leaving behind frosted lakes and gaggles of hockey-playing friends, the Feelings realise that a tough season lies ahead of them: puberty, with its stirrings of vague arousal, territorial pissing matches with the parents, and general angst about being popular and fitting in. But it's also a time when experiences no longer belong to the realm of a single emotion - growing up is complex, messy.

The Feelings enter a crisis when Riley's "core emotions", represented by golden crystal balls surging with after-images of major life events, get sucked out of the cockpit, and Joy and Sadness find themselves joining forces to return them. The adventure takes them through the interior of the mind - the catacombs of memories, the dream factories, the dark chambers of the subconscious, the labyrinths of abstract thought.

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Inside Out is clever, frequently funny and dreamed up in the most delicious palette of bubble-gum pinks and creamy tangerines. It's clearly designed for parents and their children, replete with inside jokes about San Franciscan bears, and featuring a hipster pizza parlour called "Yeast of Eden", which sells organic broccoli pizza.

Joy and Sadness will eventually come across some interesting discoveries, not the least of which is the insight that sadness is an indispensable part of being human. But things stay Pixar-level PG, and we get no encounter with the more twisted aspect of psychodynamics: jealousy, depression, masochism. Which is just as well, because a great deal of its more perplexing subject matter will glance off the foreheads of tender youth anyway.

Inside Out is lovely, like a pop-up book, and may help soften the bitter edges of becoming a grown-up.

Rating: 4/5 stars