Inside Out

If there’s anything we should realize by now about the way Disney markets its animated films – whether from Disney Animation Studios or Pixar – it’s that there’s simply no way to know from the advertising what these films are actually about. Brave’s advertising played up the comic relief from the mischievous triplets, completely hiding the fact that the central story was about a complex mother-daughter relationship. Frozen’s marketing campaign emphasized Olaf the snowman and the playful reindeer, again hiding the centrality of the female protagonists. And Big Hero 6 kept the focus on gentle robot Baymax, burying the grief and anger of main character Hiro. There’s what a movie is, and there’s what a movie sells, and if you don’t realize that Disney is remarkably – perhaps even cynically – savvy about such matters, you’re gonna be in for some big surprises.

That preface is crucial for any adult considering seeing Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out, and basing that decision on what they see in commercials. Because while the brightly colored central characters and the high-concept premise might suggest a simplistic, gag-filled story, you have no idea the emotional complexity director Pete Docter has packed into this terrific adventure. And that high concept is indeed easy to distill: Inside us all is an emotional “control room,” with physical manifestations of those emotions responding to the things that push our metaphorical buttons by pushing literal buttons. For an 11-year-old girl named Riley (Kailyn Dias), whose parents (Kyle MacLachlan and Diane Lane) have just moved from Minnesota to San Francisco, those emotions take the form of Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and Anger (Lewis Black). As Riley struggles with adjusting to her new home and new surroundings, Joy and Sadness wind up whisked away to the far reaches of Riley’s subconscious, trying to preserve the happiness of Riley’s “core memories” and make their way back to headquarters.

The fanciful scenario allows Docter and company to craft a fantastically detailed world inside Riley’s brain. Memories are stored in the form of colored balls that race along shiny tracks, with clean-up crews doing the work of weeding out stuff we all know we’ll never remember. It’s an animator’s dream to create an entire universe from scratch, andInside Out does so with creativity that pops with its own perfect internal logic. Yet as terrific a technical achievement as Inside Out might be, it’s an even better piece of writing. Throughout his Pixar films – which also include Monsters Inc. and Up – Docter has shown himself to be deeply connected to parent-child relationships. Here, he’s wrestling with something that on its surface would seem to be too much of a downer for an ostensibly “family” film: How do parents deal with their carefree child transitioning into the more complicated emotional life of an adolescent? With Joy serving as the parental surrogate, Inside Out hits some of the same notes Toy Story 3 did in touching on transitional moments when a mother or father has to let go of a child as they know them, in order to make way for the adult they’ll eventually become.

There’s plenty of fun to be found in the characters and voice performances – including Richard Kind as Riley’s pink elephant imaginary friend Bing Bong – plus a bunch of hilarious postscript material. But whatever Inside Out offers to kids is nothing compared to what the Pixar films continue to deliver for adults, in storytelling that nails some of the most defining lump-in-the-throat moments of human experience.

INSIDE OUT (31/2) Directed by Pete Docter and Ronaldo del Carmen • Starring Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling, Richard Kind, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan • Rated PG • 94 min. • At Maya Cinemas, Century Cinemas Del Monte, Northridge Cinemas, Lighthouse Cinemas.