What do you do when you've made movies about bugs, fish, rats, toys, monsters, robots, and cars? Well, you go existential of course.

It's an impressive feat to go from obscure Steve Jobs start-up to leading animation studio in the space of 20 years, but ever since the release of Toy Story in 1995, that's exactly what Pixar have done.

Their iconic status is cemented and such is their fame, that the studio name is often a bigger draw than the movie itself.

You don't see that with the likes of Universal, 20th Century Fox and such. So, they've undoubtedly conquered the Western world.

Inside Out is Pixar's latest movie. In it, we are treated to a young sweet girl by the name of Riley, and the mind within.

Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust rule Riley's roost, reacting to the world, nudging her hither and thither, and trying desperately to make everything ok.It is made clear that from the get go, Joy is the captain of the team. As Riley moves to San Francisco, so her childhood innocence and identity are challenged.

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What follows is the well-used and time-tested formula of storytelling, and it works. This is vintage Pixar.

They've been doing it from the start, mind. Writing and executing the perfect symphonies, crafted with the same winning formula that forever turns the audience into a blubbering mess.

So it is with this film. It's pretty devastating stuff, and it's hilarious.

Instead of creating characters who we might identify with, this film literally offers an insight into what makes us tick. The upshot is that the personified emotions coax out a knowing laugh or an unforeseen lump in the throat.


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That being said, this intelligent take on our lives does teeter perilously on the edge of novelty value, as in the end credits, we are offered insights into a plethora of other characters, human and animal alike.

It's all good fun of course, but unlike ingenious films like Ratatouille, where the makers don't hammer the metaphors down your throat, in this movie, there's a hint of smugness to their fresh insights.

It's difficult to stomach it, but Pixar unfortunately, are not perfect.

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Only occasionally have they created true masterpieces. Fantastic though this film is, it is not one of them.

It's all just a little bit too convenient. We, by our very nature, are cumbersome. More often than not, even as a child, we feel several things at once. We only learn to articulate it later on, if at all.

This writer has personally experienced an almost identical situation to Riley, and did not identify with her feelings.

In this movie you see, emotions must be just so; popping up at the right times, and reacting in just the right ways. And of course, there's plenty of other emotions that many other kids feel, aside from these ones.

Ok, these are very small bugbears, because the film is still executed with genuine love, but it's almost as if Disney had a bigger hand in Pixar studios this time.

The human condition has been neatly packaged into a feel-good film, as opposed to being a little bit more messy, which is more real.

That's the problem when you take on this kind of subject matter, it's universally felt, sure, yet it's never felt in exactly the same way. These slight imperfections aside though, the film still tells a compelling coming of age story.

It may not be up there with Pixar's top films, but it will certainly touch more than a few hearts.

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Inside Out (U) is out Friday, July 24