Inside Out (2015) Reviews: What Critics Said

Editorial note: This is a roundup of published criticism of Inside Out. Celluloid has not screened the film for this piece, and it carries no Celluloid rating. The critics are named and linked under Sources.

Is Inside Out worth watching?

Critics say yes, and with unusual warmth: Inside Out was greeted as one of Pixar’s boldest and most moving films, a family comedy that sets out to defend sadness. Reviewers singled out its inventive premise, the pairing of Amy Poehler and Phyllis Smith, and an emotional payoff that reached adults at least as much as children. The reservations were modest and fairly consistent: a middle stretch that settles into a familiar quest, and emotion characters who work more as ideas than as rounded personalities.

What is Inside Out about?

Eleven-year-old Riley’s life is uprooted when her family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco. Inside her head, five personified emotions, Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust, run a control centre and try to steer her through the change. When Joy and Sadness are swept out of headquarters by accident, the pair must cross the stranger regions of Riley’s mind to find their way back.

Inside Out is directed by Pete Docter, who wrote the screenplay with Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley. The voice cast is led by Amy Poehler as Joy and Phyllis Smith as Sadness, with Bill Hader as Fear, Lewis Black as Anger, Mindy Kaling as Disgust and Kaitlyn Dias as Riley, alongside Richard Kind, Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan. It was released in 2015 and runs 95 minutes.

What critics praised

Much of the enthusiasm centred on the nerve of the concept. Reviewing the Cannes premiere for TheWrap, Steve Pond placed it alongside Up, WALL-E and Toy Story 3 among the studio’s richest and most satisfying work, and argued that Docter had carried off a daunting idea with genuine thematic maturity, as both a grand adventure and a film that pulls hard at the heart. In Time, Mary Pols described it as perhaps the most outlandish thing Pixar had attempted, a family film willing to tackle brain chemistry and something close to depression. She found its visual invention close to hallucinatory, likened its imaginative reach to Fantasia, and rated it the studio’s best since Toy Story 3.

Critics were just as struck by what the film has to say. Pols valued its picture of emotions juggling together rather than fighting one another, and the way Joy slowly comes to understand what Sadness is for. At the A.V. Club, A.A. Dowd thought it might be the most conceptually daring film Pixar had made, and praised the profound case it builds for sadness as necessary and healthy. He compared its thematic ambition to Boyhood, enjoyed the comic double act of Poehler and Smith, and picked out Richard Kind’s Bing Bong, Riley’s half-forgotten imaginary friend, as the film’s most poignant figure.

Writing for Paste, Tim Grierson called it the best thing Pixar had released in some time and admired its emotional intelligence. He judged the opening act enormously clever and the closing stretch magnificent, and credited the film with a pointed observation about modern parenting and the pressure to keep children happy at all costs. He also considered Poehler ideally cast as Joy.

Where critics were divided

None of these critics disliked the film, but several placed limits on the praise. Grierson felt the second act lost momentum, turning into a more perfunctory, episodic journey instead of building tension, and thought Sadness risked being a one-note character, rescued largely by Smith’s performance. He did not count the visual design among Pixar’s most innovative. Dowd made a related point: in his view it is not one of the company’s most spectacular creations, it does not wring every comic possibility from its premise, and the emotions are flatter than earlier Pixar heroes, serving mainly as working parts of Docter’s message.

Pond’s hesitation concerned the audience rather than the craft. He was unsure how pre-teen viewers would take a film built on abstract ideas about thought and memory, while concluding that it offers enough colour and adventure to keep them entertained either way.

Who is it for?

The reviews point to a family film that plays at least as strongly for adults, and parents in particular, as for children. Grierson expected it to remind grown-ups how fragile childhood is, and Pond’s doubts were about whether the youngest viewers would follow its ideas, not whether they would enjoy it. It is rated PG in the US and U in the UK. Its drama is emotional rather than frightening, built around loss, change and growing up.

Viewers who value Pixar at its most reflective will find the studio at full ambition here. For more in the same vein, browse the site’s animation titles.

The critical verdict

The critics gathered here treated Inside Out as a high point for Pixar, with Pols and Grierson both calling it the studio’s strongest work in years. They praised a clever, emotionally exact film that makes a persuasive argument for sadness, and a voice cast led by Poehler and Smith. Doubts about a slacker middle act and thinly drawn emotion characters were real but minor beside that praise. The consensus is that it rewards adults as much as children, and perhaps more.