“I just wish I knew what you were thinking.” This statement is so common for us who communicate and cannot read minds.

In the movie “Inside Out” the audience is dumped right into the mind of a young girl experiencing a huge life change.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a die- hard movie fan. I love every kind of movie there is-whether its comedy, horror or adventure, but animated movies are not usually my first pick.

“Inside Out” was a little out of my typical movie genre, but I was blown away. It was one of my favorite movies of the summer.

The movie begins with a standard American family holding their newborn daughter, Riley, or the first time.
Then, it slowly transitions into a scene where all emotions appear. Mind you, they take on a human appearance for the sake of being understood. The emotions have the task to regulate Riley’s behavior day in and day out. In order to do this they have a control panel to activate the display of a variety of emotions inside Riley’s head. For example, if sadness ran the board, then Riley would feel sad about a situation. I thought the emotions were appropriately depicted. Joy always has a smile. Anger is beat red and when he gets upset he shoots flames from his head. Sadness is mopey and blue.

Near the beginning of the movie, Riley’s father gets a new job, which forces them to move to San Francisco. The emotions quickly show how they feel about the situation when Riley moves out of her house, and you could say it definitely wasn’t a blissful experience for them. Joy takes charge as the leader or most important emotion of the group. Until, Sadness tries to feel the energy of a happy memory and turns the joyful memory to an unhappy one. Here is where the adventure begins to re- verse the damage Sadness created and a full odyssey ensues.

There are various islands that exist in Riley’s head, to name a couple: goofball island, family island and honesty island. These were created after a life experience proved to be a learning lesson and became a core memory of her life.

I was thoroughly impressed with how everything looked in the movie. I loved how brightly colored everything was.

Throughout the adventure, I was also impressed with Joy and Sadness’s excursion to the newer heights of Riley’s mind. I appreciated the valuable lesson of: You can’t enjoy happiness without understanding what sadness is. There were many themes throughout the movie, but my favorite is that people are constantly changing, and this movie really brought to life the transition of young childhood into early adolescence.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie. I thought there was some real truth in how our emotions show others what we are thinking not to mention how cute they look on screen.

5 stars out of 5.