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Inside Out
Director: Pete Docter
Country/Year: U.S., 2015
Opened: June 19
Where: Wide
REVIEW BY MICHAEL SRAGOW
PIXAR'S PETE DOCTER HAS A GENIUS FOR spinning imaginative extravaganzas out of mundane materials-kids' room closet doors in Monsters, Inc., an old man's gingerbread house in Up. With Inside Out, he reaches into an 11-year-old girl's mind and creates a marvelous mental landscape out of visual elements as prosaic as jellybeans and clowns. The movie is both audacious and unpretentious, starting with its heroine, Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias), a Minnesota girl who loves her mom (Diane Lane), dad (Kyle MacLachlan), and ice hockey. She's a paradigm of American happy-childhood kitsch-or at least that's how the gal who introduces Riley's story, Joy (Amy Poehler), desperately wants us to see her.
In a Disney/Pixar first, Joy turns out to be an unreliable narrator who shades reality to fit her temperament. Oh, and one other thing: Joy is not a flesh-and-blood female but the embodiment of an emotion inside Riley's head....