Inside Out (2015) - Pete Docter & Ronnie Del Carmen

One of the most inventive films of the year, Pete Docter & Ronnie Del Carmen's Inside Out is the latest, great Pixar film that on the surface may be made for children, due to the beautiful animation, but it's unquestionably a film that will mean more for adults due to its ingenious examination of emotion, personality, and the human mind in general.  Centered around Riley, a young girl, who is uprooted from her Midwest life when her father starts a new job in San Francisco, Inside Out is the story of a young girl dealing with the stresses associated with massive change, an existential crisis of sorts, and the emotions which inhabit her young psyche.  Funny, cute, and playful, Inside Out certainly has enough to appeal to the children, but the film's determination to explore existential crises makes it a film more for adults, which surprisingly manages to capture how humanity is at its best with the right emotional composition.  The emotions themselves feel well-represented as well, as I'm no psychiatrist, but I found it a fascinating decision that Anger is leading the charge when it comes to Riley's decision to runaway, as Anger is typically an emotion that nothing good comes of.  It's a little hard to explain, but Inside Out uses these cute, cuddly characters, each which represents a different emotion, to tell a story that the kids can somewhat follow, while the interactions of the human characters themselves provide the true value of the film, exploring the emotional state of characters and how quickly they can consume our overall demeanor.  Incredibly complex and surprisingly mature, Inside Out captures the reflexive quality of emotion, how they are almost never mutually exclusive, and most importantly how sadness and joy are part of the important equilibrium of life.  Pete Docter & Ronnie Del Carmen's Inside Out captures the old magic of Pixar, something that I'd argue we haven't seen in quite awhile, actually let me take that one step farther, this is without question, in my mind, the best film Pixar has ever made, being a film that captures a lot of universal truths about emotions.

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