Review - Inside Out

Leave it to Pixar – the animation haven that made us believe a rat could cook, and a house could fly, and a robot could fall in love – to make their latest brainchild... well, the brain of a child. Or more specifically, the feelings that make it tick.
As such, Inside Out is the studio's most ambitious concept to date, and also one of its greatest triumphs. This wonderful invention of cinema does more than make you laugh and cry (and it will make you do both); It blithely examines the human condition and what it finds is deceptively profound.

Riley Anderson (voiced by Kaitlyn Diaz) is a perfectly normal, perfectly happy 11-year-old girl. Her early life growing up in Minnesota may seem a bit ordinary on the outside, but her gray matter is anything but gray. Pixar represents it as a bubblegum-tinted world of pure imagination, overseen by the five core emotions – Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger – that literally push her buttons from a command booth in her frontal lobe.

Giving voice to these tiny balls of neurological energy are a quintet of TV comedians who would seem almost too perfectly typecast in a lesser film. It's to their (and the animators') enormous credit that we never get distracted trying to picture the actor behind the caricature.