Pixar's latest 3D animation film, Inside Out, opens in UK cinemas this week, and while some have called it the "best children's film ever", others think it offers a more sinister message for today's young people.
The Pixar/Walt Disney co-production, featuring the voices of Amy Poehler, Bill Hader and Kyle McClachlan, opened to acclaim at the 68th Cannes film festival in May, and has since gone on to break US box office records.
Inside Out tells the story of a little American girl called Riley, growing up with five competing emotions inside her mind – joy, sadness, fear, anger and disgust. When Riley's family have to move to a new home for work, Riley's emotions struggle to adjust causing emotional turmoil, but joy and sadness work together to restore the balance.
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Most critics have fallen under the movie's spell. Could Inside Out be the best children's film ever made? asks Bryony Gordon in the Daily Telegraph. "Quite possibly."
It's an animated movie about mental health, says Gordon, and it is almost unthinkable that it would have been made a decade ago. Gordon adds that she wishes it was around when she was a child and "melancholy was an unwelcome emotion to be banished".
One of the delights of Pixar's film about emotions is that "Freud is banished to the sidelines", says Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent. This is a film for the computer age, where "consciousness is perceived almost as if it is a computer hard drive and emotion as something that can be expressed by hitting buttons on a keyboard".
But what hasn't changed since The Wizard Of Oz days, says Macnab, is the notion that "there is no place like home".
It's more complex than that, says Xan Brooks, in The Guardian. If anything, the film is suggesting that Riley is Oz. But really, says Brooks, while this film is "a dream for children, and a delight for parents, it's a nightmare for critics to deconstruct".
Once upon a time, this genre looked simple, adds Brooks, then along comes Pixar with this "metaphysical mould-breaker", a film that embraces sadness and doubt, and all of a sudden "we're not in Kansas any more".
One critic found a less palatable message. James Douglas on website The Awl, writes that Inside Out has "a quasi-humanist narrative hook that enables public digestion" but really it's not humanist at all, it's subliminal programming to create a new generation of willing workers.
In every Pixar film, says Douglas, "the protagonist's arc is oriented toward the ultimate goal of being an efficient, productive worker". In Inside out, the trouble starts when Riley's dad uproots his family from a comfortable home and moves them to San Francisco for his start-up. He's then too busy to deal with his daughter's distress. But rather than condemning this state of affairs, it is Riley's burden to accept and deal with.
What Inside Out is really suggesting, says Douglas, is that growing up is about "accommodating the pressures of capitalism".
