By Andrew Kendall
There is a scene in the film Inside Out which sees a trio of characters entering a danger zone called ‘Abstract Thought’. “You should never go in there,” one of them cautions, “No one understands it.” For adults, it’s an amusing bit of on-the-nose dialogue; for children, the dialogue is secondary to the visually humorous way the scene unfolds. The moment becomes a key to the film, though, because abstract thought is complex and difficult to understand. That is why Inside Out (the15th feature length film from Pixar, America’s most acclaimed animated studio of the moment) ends up being marvellous even before it’s gone very far. For, the characters I mention in the opening are not people but feelings. The film itself is a metaphor which depends on abstract thought.
Inside Out follows the emotions of an eleven-year-old girl, Riley, where those emotions are