Inside Out Review

The premise could have been a chart. Instead Docter and his team build a mind that behaves like one, where memories arrive as colored spheres and take the tint of whichever emotion touches them, personality stands on islands that can fall, and the whole apparatus is maintained overnight by staff who dump whatever nobody uses. The film then runs a genuine argument through that machinery. Joy spends most of the picture keeping Sadness away from the console, and the reversal, when it comes, is not that sadness is secretly pleasant but that it is the signal which summons other people.

A children's film landing on grief as a social act is doing more than its brief requires. The structure underneath is a standard journey home, and the middle sags once we reach Abstract Thought, but the Bing Bong sequence is the cruelest thing Pixar has done to a room full of parents and it is fully earned. Michael Giacchino's theme does an enormous amount of quiet work. Best of all is the refusal to restore the old settings at the end, since the girl who comes back is not the girl who left.