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Inside Out | 2015 | PG | - 1.3.1

A young girl's (Kaitlyn Dias) emotions fall into turmoil caused by a family move and the destruction of some of her memories by the emotion Sadness (Phyllis Smith). The other emotions discount Sadness, but Joy (Amy Poehler) helps her look for the missing memories, while Anger (Lewis Black) blows his top, and other emotions go rogue. Also with Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan and Richard Kind. Directed by Pete Doctor. [1:34]

SEX/NUDITY 1 - Different women daydream of the same man whose white shirt is open to show curly chest hair as he says each time, "Come fly with me" in several scenes; in one of these scenes, a woman says about her husband, "I gave up a Brazilian helicopter pilot for him?" In "Imagination Land" we see the image of an 11-year-old girl's imaginary boyfriend, who can say, "I will die for her." A wide-eyed preteen boy meets a preteen girl and we see inside his head that all of his emotions are screaming, rolling on the floor and running in confusion in red emergency lighting. In a canyon of memories a female character says that she wants to have a Vampire Love Story Island. On a large emotion-regulating console with many buttons and levers, we see a button marked "Puberty," as a voiceover states, "Riley [a preteen girl] is 12 years old now -- what could happen?"
 A naked one-year-old girl runs away from the camera and hops into an armchair, where she slaps her own bottom several times and laughs. In a middle school classroom and cafeteria, some girls wear body-hugging jeans that emphasize curves and a few wear heavy eye makeup. A woman wears body-hugging jeans that accentuate her large posterior in several scenes. A one-year old girl wears her panties on top of her head in a close-up.

VIOLENCE/GORE 3 - An imaginary friend that is a pink elephant with a bushy cat's tail loses an arm (no blood) and evaporates as he stands on glass balls, waving toward the camera. A woman rides up a pneumatic tube and falls out into a canyon full of glass spheres, but she is undamaged; a woman is unable to walk up a mound of spheres to get out, slipping back on each try until a male elephant helps a woman fly a rocket wagon out of a canyon on rainbow-colored exhaust, but they fail on the first two attempts and he loses an arm (no blood); she runs back, crying, when she sees he sacrificed himself and is evaporating from existence. In a dream/movie sequence a dog costume rips in half and we see a bone sticking out of brown end half of the dog, looking like a bone-in ham.
 A preteen girl's mind has five "lands" of personality that look like Disneylands with odd castles, including Goofball Land, Hockey Land, Friendship Land, Honesty Land and Family Land; as the girl attempts to stifle Sadness and Sadness makes more happy memories sad, each of these lands shuts down and disintegrates, falling into a deep canyon and with each disintegration we hear metal twisting, glass clinking, and ceramics clanging into one another and the pieces fall on top of smoldering, burnt out memories and we see wafting smoke spires as balls crumble and disappear.
 A male creature represents anger and often scowls, grunts, snarls, grits his teeth, emits flames from his head when he is enraged, and criticizes others; several times, his eyes widen and he screams when he hears an annoying jingle for chewing gum. A young man begins to curse by taking a breath, but a loud beep sounds off screen instead (from a computer console), and he does not speak. A young man uses physical anger, punching, strangling, throwing chairs, pounding tabletops, and throwing an emotion against an unbreakable plate glass window. An emotion taunts another emotion until he becomes so angry that the fire from his head is twice as tall and twice as wide as usual; then, she uses him as a blowtorch to remove a glass window to rescue two female characters that are hanging onto a ledge (they nearly fall). We see inside the mind of a male exhibiting road rage and see only five emotions; they are all Anger (in different colors), emitting flames from the tops of their heads. Anger in a man's mind wonders why his wife is speaking to him: "Did I leave the toilet seat up?"
 An emotion causes a chain reaction of unhappiness in a little girl by ruining good memories and losing core memories from a memory-holding device and one emotion struggles with another over control of memory spheres; both characters rise into a pneumatic tube and fly away with the spheres to the long-term memory area of the brain, where the spheres are lost. Two emotions argue mildly several times and escalate to louder voices briefly, because one causes the girl's happy memories to become sad and causes crying when one emotion touches them. An imaginary friend cries, producing wrapped candies as tears, while hugging an emotion; he cries three or four more times in other scenes. An emotion cries in one scene and later, another breaks down and cries loudly. A preteen girl runs away from home after stealing a credit card from her mom's purse; she goes to a big city bus station late at night, alone, along dirty streets, but once on the bus, she changes her mind, gets off and runs home where she cries very hard in front of her parents, telling them she cannot meet their expectations of being happy all the time.
 A one-year-old in a high chair screams, shouts and throws her food into her father's face and onto the floor. A one-year-old girl becomes angry at toys, scowls, and shouts nonsensical syllables. A one-year old girl screams and cries for no known reason. A preteen girl cries hard in her classroom causing her eyes and cheeks to turn red as she sniffs. A man argues several times with his wife face-to-face and with a coworker over the phone. A preteen girl is grumpy at the dinner table and her mother keeps prodding her to be happy and talk and she yells, "Shut up!" Her father sends her to her room and she growls and stomps upstairs. In a Skype conversation, a preteen girl becomes angry and scowls when a female friend talks about a new female friend; the first girl ends the chat session and decides to stop making friends. At challenging middle school hockey tryouts, a preteen girl becomes angry and storms off the ice while shouting, and throws her gear down saying that she has quit hockey.
 When a preteen girl hears that her family is moving from the Midwest to San Francisco, all the emotions in her head scream in protest; when the family car arrives in San Francisco streets, we hear angry drivers shouting out car windows at one another and in the girl's mind one emotion emits fire from its head and accidentally ignites another, that runs around the room; another emotion puts out the flames with a fire extinguisher and we see smoke, but no damage.
 An emotional-regulation console in the girl's mind runs under control of emotions Joy and Sadness; Anger, Disgust, and Fear appear and share the console as well, but Joy forces Sadness to stand in a circle across the room, as if she does not exist. Inside a preteen girl's mind, an emotion-control console turns completely black, indicating that the girl's emotions have all shut down; when they return, the girl begins to cry very hard, and falls asleep, feeling better. One emotion is depicted as being short, female, blue from head to toe, and often lies down on the ground, because being sad fatigues her while another emotion pulls her around by one foot and they argue regularly, when one emotion turns happy memories to sad memories as she touches them.
 Memory spheres change color and jellybean-character workers throw them into a deep canyon as discards. Inside a girl baby's mind, happy memories become glass spheres that collect, gradually travel to long-term memory, and stack up when jellybean type workers stack them within tall walls.
 Two female characters and an elephant with a cat's tail walk into a tunnel marked "danger" and find themselves turning into cubist art forms, then they become two dimensional, and then each turns into a line (they reverse the process to become 3-D again when they leave the other end of the tunnel); they jump on a train, but it slides off a suspension bridge when an island to which the track is attached falls into a canyon and as the train falls the three characters escape unharmed. Two female characters attempt to walk across a clanging metal pipe that spans a large canyon, but slip and run back to safety as the ground splits around them.
 An elephant is found in a cage made of balloons balanced on a snoring giant clown's chest and one character frees it, wakes the clown and leading it to another land where it stomps like thunder and breaks through some perimeter walls with a wooden sledgehammer and destroying a group of dancing cupcakes, which vanish.
 A thin male character shakes with nerves in several scenes and screeches in fear; he lies on the floor and shakes with mild convulsions in one scene and he climbs inside a glass chamber with glass memory balls that squish him, breaking the glass (the shards disappear), and slamming him against a plate glass window in another scene; three large glass balls hit him in the eyes and mouth before he slides to the floor, off screen and he later spits a large glass ball out of his mouth (it looks dry). A small male cloud person shouts at another character, who stomps through him, disintegrating him; the cloud man's wife reports this to a police officer jellybean later and another character runs through her, disintegrating her, leaving the officer looking at empty space. A female character clones a hundred imaginary boyfriends and builds a single file tower with them, climbs to the top, and leans them over to make a bridge across a canyon to escape from a strange land.
 A preteen girl dreams of a cartoonish rat suddenly dying and falling off screen after ghosts fly out of a dark haunted house while at the same time, a large brown bear delivers a vegetarian pizza that she hates to the house. A preteen girl dreams and the dream appears as a movie filmed by jellybean characters using a distortion lens to make themselves look human; a crying incident replays in the movie, but now a classmate throws popcorn and says the first girl's teeth are falling out, and then squeals that the girl is wearing no pants to school.
 A family car slides down an incline and hits a stone dinosaur statue, but there is no damage. Three characters ride on flat stones through a sea of lava, unharmed. A preteen girl is disappointed by her new home that is dirty and dingy and she looks frightened of the dark corridors and of shadows in her bedroom.
 A character says, "Barf." A male creature is delighted when he finds a large computer file of curse words (we do not see or hear them). A male creature says, tree times that he wants to speak a curse word, but he does not.
 A flashback shows that a girl eats soup while holding her nose as we hear that soup spurted out of it (we do not see it).

LANGUAGE 1 - Name-calling (crazy, idiot, stupid, moron, dumb, nitwit, weird, old man, monster, monkey, goofball, fat, annoying, sucker, lucky dog, boring, useless, ridiculous, fraud, bad actor, Mom Bad News Train Grandma, San Fran Stink Town). stereotypical references to men, women, parents, teachers, preteen girls, business owners, movers, cliques, people who suppress emotions, angry drivers, sports fans, actors, Minnesotans, San Franciscans, Goths, exclamations (heck, eeeewww! what the ..., boooo! shut-up).

SUBSTANCE USE - None.

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Emotions, life changes, memories, understanding, respect, courage, love, sacrifice, reconciliation, balance, healing, contentment, growing up.

MESSAGE - Suppressing sadness can cause all the other emotions to shut down.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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