Inside Out only started showing in Malaysian theaters a couple of days ago while it’s US premiere was back in June. Since blockbusters generally try pretty hard to have near-simultaneous releases worldwide, I think this is a good indication that our local distributors don’t expect this to be a big hit on our shores. Still, this gap means that there’s been plenty of time to build up anticipation since this film is being heralded as Pixar’s return to form after several years of lackluster projects.

Perhaps one reason why this isn’t seen as having much potential to be a hit here is its subject matter. The main characters are the five emotions, Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger inside the head of a young girl named Riley. When her family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco, the turmoil of the transition is reflected and exacerbated by the conflict and trouble among the emotions, especially when Joy and Sadness are sucked outside of Headquarters. While the two try to traverse Riley’s inner mindscape to get back, the rest of the emotions do their best to manage Riley’s life on their own, inadvertently causing Riley to sink deeper and deeper into depression.

The whole film takes place almost entirely within the mindscape, with the view switching to the real world only to show the consequences of the events that occur in Riley’s mind. There’s absolutely no fighting of any kind involved and indeed the greatest danger for any of the characters involved is not death but rather being forgotten. Since the story is in effect a metaphor for the inner workings of the mind and has a correspondingly more complex plot than Pixar’s usual offerings, it’s no wonder that even the studio itself was hesitant about this project’s commercial prospects. It’s not just a movie about emotions, it’s about the changing emotions of a pre-teen girl young girl as she grows up.

Both my wife and myself however loved it precisely because it’s so different from everything else. It’s nothing short of brilliant in how it manages to design physical manifestations of all of the aspects of the mind. So you have things like the Train of Thought, which naturally runs only when Riley’s is awake, the amusement park-like personality islands, the memory dump where old memories are thrown away to eventually fade to nothing and many more. I’m not convinced that there’s much scientific basis in these representations, but it makes a consistent kind of sense and more importantly is deliriously fun and endlessly inventive. Its a fantastic use of animation that I can’t imagine could ever work in live-action.

It was only after looking up information on the film that I realized that this was directed Pete Docter, the same person responsible for the equally amazing Up. Indeed, both films share an impressive grasp of interpersonal relationships and a realistic character arc that don’t often show up in animated features. Inside Out moreover displays a kind of emotional maturity and sophistication that exceeds even Up. The redditor in me (not that I’m much of a fan of the site) is delighted that this is a movie that is all about feels, not reals. As I understand it, writing the story and getting it perfect was an arduous process across many iterations that went on many years, partially explaining why Docter hadn’t made another film in between Up and Inside Out.

There aren’t many bad things to say about Inside Out. My wife thinks they could have done more with the message of how even the so-called negative emotions should be seen as a central part of human nature. I think that it’s a shame that apart from Joy and Sadness, the other emotions seem to serve only as comic relief. Structurally, it’s a bit too obvious that the elaborate and implausibly difficult path they need to take to get back to Headquarters is just a poor excuse to show off the diversity of Riley’s mindscape. But seen next to the amazing originality and fantastic execution of the piece, these are really minor quibbles. This is easily Pixar’s best film since at least Toy Story 3, and that was five years ago. Unfortunately, judging by traffic on the LYN forums (lots of discussion about the new Hitman: Agent 47 movie that was released on the same day in Malaysia, zero posts about this one), the distributors may well be correct in their judgment that this will be overlooked over here.