Inside Out (2015 film)

Inside Out
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Pete Docter
Produced by	Jonas Rivera
Screenplay by	Pete Docter Meg LeFauve Josh Cooley
Story by	Pete Docter Ronnie del Carmen
Starring	Amy Poehler Phyllis Smith Richard Kind Lewis Black Bill Hader Mindy Kaling
Music by	Michael Giacchino
Cinematography	Patrick Lin Kim White
Edited by	Kevin Nolting
Production company	Walt Disney Pictures Pixar Animation Studios
Distributed by	Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Release dates	May 18, 2015 (2015-05-18) (Cannes) June 19, 2015 (2015-06-19) (United States)
Running time	94 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$175 million
Box office	$857.4 million

Inside Out is a 2015 American 3D computer-animated comedy-drama adventure film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The film was directed by Pete Docter and co-directed by Ronnie del Carmen, with a screenplay by Docter, Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley from a story by Docter and del Carmen. The film is set in the mind of a young girl named Riley Andersen (Kaitlyn Dias), where five personified emotions—Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), and Disgust (Mindy Kaling)—try to lead her through life as her parents (Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan) move from Minnesota to San Francisco and she has to adjust to her new life.

Docter first began developing Inside Out in 2009 after noticing changes in his daughter's personality as she grew older. The film's producers consulted numerous psychologists, including Dacher Keltner from the University of California, Berkeley, who helped revise the story by emphasizing the neuropsychological findings that human emotions affect interpersonal relationships and can be significantly moderated by them.

After premiering at the 68th Cannes Film Festival in May, Inside Out was released in North America on June 19, 2015, accompanied by the short film Lava directed by James Ford Murphy. Critics praised the film's concept, screenplay, subject matter, musical score, and the vocal performances—particularly for Poehler, Smith, and Richard Kind. The film grossed $90.4 million in its first weekend—the highest opening for an original title. It accumulated over $857 million in worldwide box office revenue. Inside Out has received several awards, including an Academy Award, BAFTA Award, Golden Globe Award, Critics' Choice Award, Annie Award, and Satellite Award for Best Animated Feature.

Plot

A girl named Riley Andersen is born in Minnesota and within her mind, five personifications of her basic emotions—Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger—gradually come to life and influence her actions via a console in her mind's Headquarters. As she grows up, her experiences become memories, stored in colored orbs, which are sent into long-term memory each night. Her five most important "core memories" (all of which are happy ones) are housed in a hub that powers "islands", each reflecting an aspect of her personality. In Headquarters, Joy acts as a de facto leader to maintain Riley's cheerful childhood, but as she and the other emotions do not understand Sadness' purpose (not even Sadness herself), she frequently tries to keep Sadness away from the console.

At the age of eleven, Riley and her parents move to San Francisco for her father's new business. Riley has poor first experiences: the new house is cramped and old, the moving van with all their belongings was misdirected, her father is under stress from his business, and a poor encounter at a pizza restaurant leaves her disheartened. When Sadness begins touching Riley's happy memories, turning them sad, Joy tries to guard them. On Riley's first day at her new school, Sadness accidentally causes Riley to cry in front of her class, creating a sad core memory. Joy, panicking, tries to dispose of it, but accidentally knocks the other core memories loose during a struggle with Sadness, deactivating the personality islands. Joy, Sadness, and the core memories are sucked out of Headquarters, and taken to the maze-like storage area of long-term memory.

Anger, Fear, and Disgust try to maintain Riley's emotional state in Joy's absence with disastrous results, distancing her from her parents, friends and hobbies, resulting in her personality islands gradually beginning to crumble and fall, one by one, into the "Memory Dump", an abyss where memories are forgotten. In desperation, Anger inserts an idea into the console prompting Riley to run away, believing that her return to Minnesota will enable her to make new happy core memories.

Joy and Sadness encounter Bing Bong, Riley's childhood imaginary friend, who suggests riding the train of thought back to Headquarters. The three eventually catch the train, but it is derailed when the "Honesty Island" collapses (when Riley steals her mother's credit card and begins to run away). In desperation, Joy abandons Sadness and tries to ride a "recall tube" back to Headquarters, but the last personality island collapses, breaking the tube, plunging Joy and Bing Bong into the Memory Dump. At the bottom, Joy begins to lose hope, but discovers a sad memory of a hockey game that becomes happy when Riley's parents and friends comfort her. Joy realizes that Sadness serves an important purpose: to create empathy in others when Riley is emotionally overwhelmed and needs help.

Joy and Bing Bong try to use Bing Bong's old wagon rocket to escape the Memory Dump, but after several tries, Bing Bong realizes their combined weight is too much and jumps out, sacrificing himself to allow Joy to escape. Joy reunites with a despondent Sadness and manages to get them to Headquarters, only to discover that Anger's idea has disabled the console, rendering Riley apathetic. To the surprise of the others, Joy hands control of the console to Sadness, who is able to successfully extract the idea, reactivating the console and prompting Riley to return home.

As Sadness reinstalls the (now sad) core memories, Riley arrives home to her parents and breaks down in tears, confessing that she misses her old life. As her parents comfort her, Joy and Sadness work the console together, creating a new core memory that combines their emotions; a new island forms representing Riley's acceptance of her new life. A year later, Riley has adapted to her new home, made new friends, returned to her old hobbies, and adopted a few new ones (fueled by new, more nuanced core memories from combinations of her emotions). Inside Headquarters, her emotions all work together on a new expanded console with room for them all, enabling Riley to lead a more emotionally complex life.

Voice cast

The film's crew, along with the English, and French voice actors, attended the film's premiere at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival: Lewis Black, Phyllis Smith, Mindy Kaling, Amy Poehler, Jonas Rivera, Marilou Berry, Pete Docter, Ronnie del Carmen, Mélanie Laurent, John Lasseter, Charlotte Le Bon, Pierre Niney, and Gilles Lellouche.

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Several of the film's creators also contributed some voice acting, including director Pete Docter as Father's Anger, and co-director Ronnie del Carmen, who provided additional voices.

Production

Development

As a child, director Pete Docter relocated with his family to Denmark when his father moved to study the music of Carl Nielsen. While his sisters had an easy time adjusting to the new surroundings, Docter felt he was judged constantly by peers. While other kids were interested in sports, Docter sat alone drawing, a hobby that eventually led him to animation. His social anxiety ended by high school.

Paul Ekman served as a consultant of the film.

In late 2009, Docter noticed his pre-teen daughter, Elie, exhibiting similar shyness. "She started getting more quiet and reserved, and that, frankly, triggered a lot of my own insecurities and fears," he said. He imagined what happens in the human mind when emotions set in. The idea to depict it through animation excited Docter, who felt it the ideal form to portray "strong, opinionated, caricatured personalities." He began researching information about the mind, alongside Jonas Rivera, a producer, and Ronnie del Carmen, a secondary director. They consulted Paul Ekman, a well-known psychologist who studies emotions, and Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Ekman had early in his career identified six core emotions—anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy, and surprise. Docter found surprise and fear to be too similar, which left him with five emotions to build characters around. Other emotions considered for inclusion during the development process were Schadenfreude, Ennui, Pride, and Hope. Keltner focused on sadness being an emotion that strengthens relationships. Both emphasized how emotions organize social lives and the structuring of interpersonal interactions.

The smash success of Docter's 2009 film Up encouraged those at Pixar to allow Docter to create another film with a more sophisticated story. Inside Out is the first Pixar film without input from co-founder and former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who died in 2011. It also lacked extensive input from John Lasseter, who was more focused on restructuring Walt Disney Animation Studios in Los Angeles at the time of its production. Executives at Disney and Pixar were positive at the proposal of making Inside Out, but acknowledged it would be difficult to market.

Story

Docter recruited a story crew to help develop the film's plot line. Although animation as an industry had been dominated by men, half of the story crew were women, in an attempt to have more diverse input. The choice to focus the film on a girl came from research that claimed that females age 11 to 17 are more attuned to expressions and emotions than others. The idea to have Riley play hockey came from Del Carmen, who observed that the sport is very popular in Minnesota. They tried to stray away from stereotypically feminine interests, such as the color pink or dresses. Initial ideas for the film found the main character, Riley, falling into a deep depression: Docter later felt they were inappropriate and scrapped them, although in the final film Riley does sink into a depression.

The film was first storyboarded over a period of two to three years, all the while undergoing screenings for Pixar's "Brain Trust", a small group of creative leaders at Pixar who oversee development on all films. After multiple screenings and suggestions from other filmmakers, the picture was put into production. It was again evaluated three months into that process. Kevin Nolting, editor of the film, estimated there were seven versions of Inside Out created before it even went into production. The story team attempted to create as much contrast with characters as possible. They found Joy the most complex character to write for, as she illustrates a broad range of "happy feelings". The earliest idea present in the final film is that Joy holds onto youth too long, setting about a "social storm" for Riley. It was not until several screenings later that they came upon the concept of moving to a new place, which created an external conflict that made the story easier to write. Initially, this crisis was to be set at a Thanksgiving Day pageant, in which Riley was hoping to be cast as its lead role, the turkey. Docter later deemed this idea too "bizarre" and it was replaced.

Docter estimated it took four years of development for the film to achieve success in marrying the architecture of Riley's mind and her personal troubles. The concept of "personality islands" helped develop the film's emotional stakes, as they directly affect events inside her mind and in her life. In one draft, the characters fell into "Idea Fields", where they would "cultivate new ideas", much like a farmer would cultivate crop. The character of Bing Bong—a discarded old imaginary friend—came about in one draft of the film as part of a refugee camp inside Riley's mind. It was difficult to achieve the correct tone for the film; for example, viewers could not be distracted by Joy's nature or feel negative about the mess she helps steer Riley into. Rivera credited the casting of Amy Poehler, in addition to the idea of moving, with helping the film find the right tone.

An early version of the film focused on Joy and Fear getting lost together, as it seemed to be the most humorous choice. By July 2012, the project was set for an evaluation screening with other Pixar filmmakers. Docter gradually began to feel that the story was not working, which led to fears that he might be fired. He took a long walk at his home one Sunday, in which he began to consider himself a failure, his previous successes "flukes", and a general sense that he should resign from the film. While pondering what he would miss about Pixar, he concluded that he would miss his coworkers and friends most of all. He soon reached a breakthrough: that emotions are meant to connect people together, and that relationships are the most important things in life. He decided to replace Fear with Sadness, which he felt is crucial to renewal. He met with Rivera and Del Carmen that night to explain his change of plans, and to his surprise, they reacted positively to it. At the screening, he informed his superiors that new plans for the film were in order. Although a "scary moment", the film remained in production.

Josh Cooley and Meg LeFauve were credited as co-writers of the screenplay following their contributions during the rewrite. Like Docter, Cooley and LeFauve included experiences with raising their own children into the screenplay. Cooley said "... we treated the emotions like parents for Riley and because all of us in the writing room are parents ourselves, we just reflected on our own experiences as parents to create the characters."

Screenwriter Michael Arndt worked for a year on the film's script, calling it "both a brilliantly creative idea but also incredibly challenging," but left the project in early 2011, adding that "knowing the Pixar process, there may not be a single word [I wrote] that remains in the final script! They've had writers work on it since then."

Casting

The film's voice cast of emotions, Amy Poehler, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, Bill Hader, and Phyllis Smith, were first announced in August 2013. With the release of the film's trailer in December 2014, it was revealed that Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan were cast in the film as Riley's parents.

Hader, who had previously cameoed in Monsters University, was cast to voice Fear, a role that he felt he "weaseled" his way into by being a "huge fan" of Pixar's filmography. Hader toured the studio over a week, and also "helped out" in the story room. He was invited to play Fear by the end of his stay there, but was also asked to contact fellow Saturday Night Live (SNL) veteran Amy Poehler, whom the team viewed as perfect for the character of Joy. "They said: 'Would you mind calling Amy? We don't want to call her and have her think we're some weirdo,'" he recalled. He phoned Poehler and explained the story to her, noting that her role would be the driving force in the film. When the story was pitched to Kaling, she broke down in tears, explaining "I just think it's really beautiful that you guys are making a story that tells kids that it's difficult to grow up and it's OK to be sad about it."

Smith was chosen by Rivera while he was watching Bad Teacher and saw her in a lunch scene. He called Docter and said "I think we found our Sadness." As the film contains several veterans of SNL, the film's team spent a week at that program for research on a live television sequence.

Richard Kind, who had previously starred in A Bug's Life, the Cars series, and Toy Story 3, portrayed Bing Bong. Kind tried to convey the same "sort of innocence" of his previous Pixar roles, and wound up not taking part in pre-release promotion as the producers decided to keep the character a secret.

Animation

The film's art design is intended to reflect 1950s Broadway musicals. Docter imagined that with emotions for characters, they could "push the level of caricature both in the design and in the style of movement to degrees [they'd] never done before." To this end, they emulated animators Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. Docter informed supervising animators Shawn Krause and Victor Navone to push the graphic caricature of each character rather than sticking to the rigid behavior of each RenderMan model. This required an artist to draw over characters in the film during dailies, using a Wacom Cintiq. One of the first scenes the team worked on was the dinnertime scene, in which viewers rapidly switch between the real world and Headquarters inside the family's minds.

In envisaging how the mind's interior would be depicted, the filmmakers concentrated on the word electrochemical; Ralph Eggleston, the film's production designer, explained, "It meant thinking of things as energy or energy-based, excitable." Each emotion has a glowing, "effervescent quality" to them (particularly Joy), which was difficult to animate as it could be viewed as distracting. "The characters are created with this energy because we are trying to represent what emotions would look like. They are made up of particles that actually move. Instead of being skin and solid, it is a massive collection of energy," Docter remarked. The team worked for eight months on Joy's "sparkly" aura, but was prepared to delete it, as it would affect the film's budget. However, Lasseter requested that it be applied for each emotion. "You could hear the core technical staff just hitting the ground, the budget falling through the roof," recalled Eggleston.

The film is localized to accommodate international audiences: In the Japanese version, for example, Riley is disgusted by green bell peppers, rather than by broccoli (the only topping offered by the local pizzeria), to reflect the fact that broccoli is generally less undesirable to Japanese children.

Music

Michael Giacchino composed the film's score; this was his fifth collaboration with Pixar and his second collaboration with Docter after Up. The producers first met with Giacchino to explain the film's concept and screen it for him. In response, he composed an eight-minute suite of music, unconnected to the film, based on his emotions viewing it. Rivera noted that while both Giacchino and Docter were musicians, they discussed the film in terms of story and character.

Soundtrack

Inside Out: Original Soundtrack
File:Inside Out Soundtrack.jpg
Soundtrack album by Michael Giacchino
Released	June 16, 2015
Recorded	2014–15
Genre	Soundtrack
Length	59:43
Label	Walt Disney
Producer	Chris Gottron (executive music) Tim MacDougall (music supervisior)
Pixar film soundtrack chronology
Monsters University (2013)Monsters University2013 Inside Out: Original Soundtrack (2015) The Good Dinosaur (2015)The Good Dinosaur2015
Michael Giacchino chronology
Jurassic World: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (2015) Inside Out: Original Soundtrack (2015) Zootopia (2016)

Walt Disney Records released the soundtrack on June 16, 2015.

Track listing

All music composed by Michael Giacchino.

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Bundle of Joy"	2:48
2.	"Team Building"	2:18
3.	"Nomanisone Island/National Movers"	4:20
4.	"Overcoming Sadness"	0:51
5.	"Free Skating"	0:59
6.	"First Day of School"	2:02
7.	"Riled Up"	1:02
8.	"Goofball No Longer"	1:11
9.	"Memory Lanes"	1:22
10.	"The Forgetters"	0:50
11.	"Chasing the Pink Elephant"	1:55
12.	"Abstract Thought"	1:47
13.	"Imagination Land"	1:25
14.	"Down in the Dumps"	1:47
15.	"Dream Productions"	1:43
16.	"Dream a Little Nightmare"	1:50
17.	"The Subconscious Basement"	2:01
18.	"Escaping the Subconscious"	2:09
19.	"We Can Still Stop Her"	2:54
20.	"Tears of Joy"	3:39
21.	"Rainbow Flyer"	2:58
22.	"Chasing down Sadness"	1:45
23.	"Joy Turns to Sadness/A Growing Personality"	7:49
24.	"The Joy of Credits"	8:18
Total length:		59:43

CD bonus track
No.	Title	Length
25.	"Lava" (From the Disney•Pixar Short Film Lava)	5:46

Release

Inside Out was first announced in August 2011 at the D23 Expo. In December 2012, Bleeding Cool reported the title of the film would be The Inside Out, while ComingSoon.net reported it would be Inside Out the following February. In April 2013, Disney officially announced the title on Twitter as Inside Out, during CinemaCon. Prior to its release, the film underwent a test screening for children, due to concerns from executives that it would be too complex for younger audiences—a fear quelled when the audience reacted positively to the picture.

The film premiered on May 18, 2015, at the 68th Cannes Film Festival, in an out-of-competition screening. In the United States, it premiered on June 8, 2015, at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, and received a wide theatrical release starting on June 19, 2015, in 2D, 3D, and select IMAX 3D theatres. It was the first animated movie to be released in Dolby Vision format in Dolby Cinema and the second for Disney following Tomorrowland. Also notable was the fact that it was one of two feature films (the other being The Good Dinosaur) released by Pixar in the same calendar year, a first for the company.

A short animated film, titled Lava, accompanied Inside Out during its theatrical release. This musical love story was directed by James Ford Murphy and produced by Andrea Warren. The story was inspired by the isolated beauty of tropical islands and the explosive allure of ocean volcanoes, and takes place over millions of years.

On June 18, 2015, Skype added faces of the five "emotions" of the film as emoticons available for use in its IM service for the next three months.

Home media

Inside Out was released by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment on Blu-ray (2D and 3D) and DVD on November 3, 2015, while a digital release was released on October 13, 2015. The Pixar's theatrical short, Lava, was included. A short film set in the world of Inside Out, titled Riley's First Date?, and directed by Josh Cooley, the head of story on the film, was included exclusively in the Blu-ray and the digital release.

Video games

An Inside Out play set featuring all five emotions as playable characters was made available for Disney Infinity 3.0.

A mobile game, Inside Out: Thought Bubbles, was released on June 18, 2015 by Disney Mobile Games on Apple App Store, Google Play, Amazon Appstore, Windows Store and Windows Phone Store. Playing as Riley's emotions, players have to match and sort memory bubbles through 485 levels (as of May 2016) inspired by the film's locations.

Reception

Box office

Inside Out grossed $356.5 million in North America and $501 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $857.4 million, against a budget of $175 million. It is the second highest-grossing 2015 animated film, the seventh highest-grossing film of 2015, the third highest-grossing Pixar film, the eleventh highest-grossing animated film of all time, and the 49th highest-grossing film overall (with the latter four rankings not adjusted for inflation). Deadline.com calculated the net profit of the film to be $279.51 million, when factoring together all expenses and revenues for the film.

Inside Out opened across 3,946 theaters in the United States and Canada, of which 3,100 showed the film in 3D. It grossed $3.7 million during its Thursday-night showings. This was a record among Pixar films that had Thursday-night showings, but behind Toy Story 3's $4 million midnight showing. The film then earned $34.2 million on its opening day, which is the second-largest opening day for a Pixar film behind Toy Story 3 ($41.1 million). It ended its opening weekend in second place with $90.4 million, behind the second-weekend gross of dinosaur thriller Jurassic World ($106.6 million). Although it was Pixar's first film not to debut at No. 1, its opening weekend gross was still the biggest for a Pixar original film (breaking The Incredibles' record), the studio's second-biggest of all time (behind Toy Story 3), the biggest weekend debut for a film that did not debut at No. 1 (breaking The Day After Tomorrow's record), and the top opening for any original film, live-action or otherwise, not based on sourced material, eclipsing the $77 million debut of Avatar. The film's successful opening has been attributed to its Cannes premiere, CinemaCon press screening, its 98% Rotten Tomatoes score, good word-of-mouth, Father's Day weekend and a successful Tuesday night Fathom screening. In its second weekend, the film fell by 42% to $52.3 million and still held the second spot behind Jurassic World. The rest of the week saw it slightly ahead of the latter. Inside Out reached the No. 1 spot at the box office on its third weekend with $29.8 million. Overall, IMAX contributed 10% or $36 million (as of September 4, 2015) of its total North American revenue. It ended up grossing a total of $356.5 million and became the second highest-grossing Pixar film (behind Toy Story 3), the fourth highest-grossing film of 2015, the seventh highest-grossing animated film of all time, the highest of 2015, and the thirty-second highest-grossing film in Canada and the United States (not adjusted for inflation).

Outside North America, the film earned an estimated $40.3 million on its opening weekend from 37 countries, which is 42% of the entire international market. Its largest openings were recorded in China ($11.7 million), the UK, Ireland and Malta ($11.4 million), Mexico ($8.6 million), Russia and the CIS ($7.6 million), Italy ($7.4 million), Germany ($7.1 million) and South Korea ($5.1 million). In total earnings, its largest markets outside the U.S. and Canada are the United Kingdom ($58.1 million), South Korea ($31.7 million) and Mexico ($31 million). It became the highest-grossing Disney or Pixar animated film of all time in Mexico (ahead of Frozen), the Philippines (ahead of Big Hero 6), India and Ukraine, and in Russia, it is the second highest-grossing Disney or Pixar film and the first Pixar film to exceed one billion rubles.

Critical response

Inside Out received universal critical acclaim. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 98%, based on 309 reviews, with a rating average of 9/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Inventive, gorgeously animated, and powerfully moving, Inside Out is another outstanding addition to the Pixar library of modern animated classics." The film also topped the site's Top 100 Animation Movies list and attains the highest position of a film released in the 21st century on the Top 100 Movies of All Time list at number 12. On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating, the film has a score of 94 out of 100, based on 48 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". In CinemaScore polls, cinema audiences gave Inside Out an average score of "A" on an A+ to F scale.

Prior to its release, there was concern among the general public that Pixar films were declining in quality, with an over-reliance on sequels. Likewise, DreamWorks Animation was beginning to flounder in the early 2010s as several films performed below expectations at the box office, leading to speculation that the "genre" of computer animation was "in a funk". Inside Out has been hailed as a return to form for Pixar by numerous film critics.

Poehler's performance was praised by critics.

Following an advance screening at CinemaCon on April 22, 2015, the film was well received by audiences. Praise was aimed for its smart storyline, although some wondered whether the concept was too complicated for young audiences and to attract family crowds. After premiering at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, the film attracted praise from film critics. Peter Debruge of Variety was effusive, calling it the studio's "greatest idea" and "a stunningly original concept that [...] promises to forever change the way people think about the way people think." The Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips called it the studio's best since Up (also directed by Docter), a "consistently inventive and a heartening corrective to recent, stockholder-driven inferiorities." Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter deemed it an "audacious concept" that stands among the most "conceptually trippy films" for family audiences. "With its quite literally cerebral bent, I think Inside Out might have some trouble fully connecting with younger kids, but grown-ups are likely to shed more than a few tears," remarked Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw felt it "buoyant and sweet-natured", though slightly inferior to Pixar's best. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of The A.V. Club, while overall positive on the film, said it "trades the wordless gracefulness and sense of discovery of the animation studio's best work for explanatory voice-over and nonstop exposition," also arguing that the Pixar animators could have been more visually adventurous to match the conceptual ambition.

As the film went into wide release, it continued to attract acclaim. Aside from naming it the best film of 2015, Kristopher Tapley of HitFix called it as "one of the best films of the 21st century." A. O. Scott of The New York Times deemed the film "an absolute delight", reserving particular praise for its "defense of sorrow, an argument for the necessity of melancholy dressed in the bright colors of entertainment." The Washington Post's Ann Hornaday considered it "that rare movie that transcends its role as pure entertainment to become something genuinely cathartic, even therapeutic, giving children a symbolic language with which to manage their unruliest emotions." Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times found it "bold, gorgeous, sweet, funny, [and] sometimes heartbreakingly sad," deeming it one of the best films of the year. Entertainment Weekly's Chris Nashawathy extolled it as "transcendent and touching [...] so smart and psychologically clever." Time's Mary Pols felt it a "nearly hallucinogenic, entirely beautiful" work that "defies the conventions of family movies." Christopher Orr of The Atlantic urged readers to view the picture, calling it "Pixar once again at the top of its game, telling the kind of thoughtful, moving meta-story it's hard to imagine being produced anywhere else." Wai Chee Dimock in the Los Angeles Review of Books compared the film to the work of neuroscientists Antonio Damasio, Dacher Keltner, and Oliver Sacks.

Accolades

Main article: List of accolades received by Inside Out

Inside Out received 15 Best Picture, 21 Best Original Screenplay and 40 Best Animated Feature nominations from over 50 different organizations and associations. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the 88th Academy Awards held in 2016. It received ten out of fourteen Annie Awards at the 43rd Annie Awards, including Outstanding Achievement in Directing in an Animated Feature Production for Docter, Outstanding Achievement in Voice Acting in an Animated Feature Production for Smith and Best Animated Feature. The American Film Institute selected Inside Out as one of the Top Ten Films of the year.

The film received the Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film at the 73rd Golden Globe Awards. It received three Critics' Choice Movie Award nominations including the win for Best Animated Feature. The New York Film Critics Circle awarded Inside Out Best Animated Film and it was named Film of the Year by National Board of Review with also winning Best Animated Film. The film was runner-up for Best Animated Film at Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards and at San Diego Film Critics Society Awards. It received four nominations from Satellite Awards including Best Screenplay - Original, Best Animated or Mixed Media Feature and Best Original Score. It took the Satellite Award for Best Animated or Mixed Media Feature. The film won the award for Best Animated Film at the 69th British Academy Film Awards in London, England, and was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay (losing to Spotlight). The film also received a Robert Award for Best American Film nomination and a David di Donatello for Best Foreign Film nomination, the Danish and Italian equivalent of the Academy Awards respectively.

Inside Out was named one of the best films of 2015 by over 100 critics and publications and was ranked second on Rotten Tomatoes and fourth on Metacritic's best scored films of 2015. According to Critics Top10, the film appeared in 340 critics' lists, with 27 of them giving the film the number one spot. It is among the most acclaimed films of 2015 alongside Mad Max: Fury Road, Carol, Spotlight, Room, and Brooklyn.

Potential sequel

On June 24, 2015, when asked about if there are plans for a possible sequel, Pete Docter explained that he had no current plans to create a sequel, stating, "There's no sequel idea from me at this point," but he also said, "Never say never." On January 14, 2016, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Docter stated that a sequel is possible, and that he and Pixar will explore ideas for a sequel, saying: "We'll see if anything turns up. To me it's not as simple as: 'We liked it, so let's make another one.' What happens is you design these characters not so much looks-wise but as they are as character and people for a story. So we'll explore it and see what happens."

See also

• The Numskulls, a British comic strip running since 1962, with a similar concept
• Herman's Head, a 1990s live-action television series with a similar concept
• Osmosis Jones, a 2001 live-action/animated hybrid film with a similar concept
• "Cranium Command", a former Epcot attraction with a similar concept
• Mental Block, a 2003 Canadian comedy TV series with a similar concept

External links

• Official website at Disney
• Official website at Pixar
• Inside Out Production Notes
• Inside Out at IMDb
• Inside Out at the Big Cartoon DataBase
• Inside Out at Rotten Tomatoes
• Inside Out at Metacritic
• Inside Out at Box Office Mojo