Inside Out **** (2015, voices of Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, Richard Kind, Kaitlyn Dias) – Movie Review

After a weaker spell, Pixar comes back strongly with a unique coming-of-age story set in the mind of an 11-year-old girl called Riley, with the main characters the five emotions that control her – Joy (voice of Amy Poehler), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith).

The bitter-sweet story has Riley (voice of Kaitlyn Dias) with her mom (Diane Lane) and dad (Kyle MacLachlan) uprooted from her happy Midwest life in Minnesota and moved to San Francisco, where she is miserable with her house and school, and they eat pizza with broccoli! Result – Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness. Can Joy overcome them all?

With writer-directors Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen obviously having immersed themselves in much research into popular psychology, this is an absolutely ideal movie for girls around the age of the heroine and their moms.

It quietly teaches kids a lot about psychology and handling their emotions and tricky situations at an often troubled time in their young lives, while having a lot of daft fun with the essentially weird idea they’ve come up with for an animation and oddball characters. Probably the weirdest and funniest is Bing Bong, who is voiced by Richard Kind.

To be critical, Docter and del Carmen’s story more or less runs out when the set up has been fully laid out, and then it’s up to screenwriters Docter, Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley to keep the movie going with the laughs, which they do with the help of voice artists Poehler and Hader. So it’s true, many hands do make light work.

Some parents have complained that, by getting into an unhappy little girl’s head, it’s essential quite miserable, downbeat and morose. Other adults have been hugely overcome – to tears even – by its big emotional surge at the end. This speaks of a powerful emotional ride you don’t normally expect in animated features. It is about something, and something real as Pixar gets into a child’s head.

Perhaps not everybody will like its story, characters or situations, or its typically Disney-style mix of upset and sentimentality, but those who do will probably think Inside Out is brilliant. Those 11-year-old girls out there will see this as a personal message to them, a life manual for overcoming their difficulties, and it could probably even end up being their favourite movie ever.

Those with anger and disgust should stay well clear, but this is for everyone who has joy in their head. And, just as in the story, it will release your inner joy.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com

I’m Bad.

I’m Sad.