#7) Inside Out, by Pete Docter (2015)

The 10s were the decade Disney studio executives hounded Pixar Animation with demands for sequels to their most lucrative properties. But that didn’t stop these independent minded artists from fighting to maintain the spirit of the company’s intent, delivering well-thought, patiently crafted original films. While Disney was getting their Incredibles 2, Cars 2 & 3, Toy Story 3 & 4, Finding Dory, and Monsters University, trailblazers like Pete Docter were focused on turning animation Inside Out, literally.

Inside Out is an unconventional, kid-friendly animation dealing with childhood depression. As we know from works like Up, Coco, and WALL-E, Pixar is never unwilling to strike sensitive nerves in viewers of all ages. Whether making us cry over lost memories, or pondering the existential, Pixar is the one mainstream animation company that goes there, all the way, holding nothing back while maintaining a PG-rating.

Inside Out may seem like a gentler episode of Black Mirror, depicting a command center inside a brain with characters representing different emotions – Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Fear, and Anger – amidst a network of departments compartmentalizing various cerebral functions. Their objective is to maintain the well being of 11 year-old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), whose joyous foundation is rocked by the family’s move from woodsy Minnesota to urban San Francisco. Riley tries to suck it up and go with the flow, but she suppresses just how sad this move is for her, leaving behind friends and happy memories. This sends Joy (Amy Poehler) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith) on a journey away from Headquarters into the lesser-travelled roads of Riley’s brain, to preserve particular core memories before they are tainted, or forgotten.

Sadness is having a little problem, accidentally tainting memories she touches with blue gloom. The memories manifest into little orbs, which are stored in Long Term or Core Memory storage units. When certain memories fade, they fall into a dark pit, the Memory Dump. As things go awry and core memories slip away, the foundations which make Riley who she is – Family, Goofball, Friendship, Hockey, and Honesty Islands – begin to crumble. Riley is realizing everything she’s lost in the move: isolated at school with no friends, no backyard ice pond to practice her hockey, which is affecting her performance negatively, and a father increasingly overwhelmed by work. They have to return her core memories to her before all is lost.

There are so many fantastic ideas happening throughout – the literal Train of Thought; Imagination Land with a factory that churns out new ideas, like an imaginary boyfriend from Canada; the shortcut through Abstract Thought, which threatens to destroy them as they whither to 2D shapes and then formless colors; Dream Productions, where dreams are made on a movie set using a reality distortion filter to make the actors look like familiar faces in Riley’s life. But the most important of these is her imaginary friend, Bing Bong (Richard Kind), a part elephant, part cat, part dolphin, mostly cotton candy manifestation she’s played with since childhood. Bing hasn’t been seen for some time, but he messes around in the halls of Long Term Memory, where he is found and recruited as a useful, albeit clumsy ally of Joy and Sadness.

In one clever scene, Joy, Sadness, and Bing concoct a plan to wakeup Riley through her dreams so they can ride aboard the Train of Thought back to Headquarters. But Bing is arrested and jailed in the Subconscious, a place for troublemakers. It is here they will arise one of her darkest fears, a clown called Jangles, to bust out of jail and crash Dream Productions; subconscious fear arising in a dream, causing a panicky wakeup. But everything is connected, each affects the other, and the consequence of no sleep causes Anger (Louis Black) to act, resulting in Riley’s plan to run away from home back to Minnesota. Anger has a very small sense of reasoning, determining that if Minnesota is the place of her core memories, it must be the only place to get them. The stakes are raised, and Joy will do whatever it takes to get back and fix things.

Therein lies the problem: Joy thinks she’s the one to fix everything. All along, Sadness has been treated like the problem, which naturally means she should just be quarantined and kept from affecting anything. But when Joy encounters forgotten memories that are both joyful and sad, she begins to realize the impact of both. Expression of sadness allows others to lend a helping hand, like parents. The film teaches us that we should confront our sadness, not run away from it, but allow it to process.

Inside Out won Pete Docter the 2016 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and there could be no one more deserving. It never resorts to being outlandish or silly, as is the primary function of so many ‘kids movies.’ The film’s poignancy relentlessly unfolds in a clever, witty, meticulous chronicle of a child’s psyche, colorful and imaginative in a way that honors the name they work for, Walt Disney, and his original vision for animated classics. Docter is now running business at Pixar and has promised that the foreseeable future will offer more original works, fewer sequels.

From Pixar Animation Studios. Directed by Pete Docter. Written by Pete Docter, Meg LaFauve, and Josh Cooley. Produced by Jonas Rivera. Music by Michael Giacchino. Starring Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, Kaitlyn Dias, Diane Lane, and Kyle MacLachlan. Rated PG.

Now streaming on Disney+