I just saw Pixar's Inside Out.  I think it's a fantastic movie.  It has 98% approval from critics on rotten tomatoes.

It had an unpromising opening, with a close-up of a baby girl.  I'm a tough audience for movies that rely on the cuteness of babies.  Fortunately the girl inside her was cuter--at least, one of them was.  The movie is about the homunculi who live in our brains and make our decisions for us.

So it opens with weirdness and wonders, and an introduction of a strange cast, then quickly establishes the initial conflict: The girl whose head we're (literally) in has to move, from Minnesota (why be more specific than that?  it's Minnesota) to San Francisco.  Several scenes show why she's unhappy in her new home, and then we get to the second conflict, which is that the little people mess up somehow, and her emotions start shutting down as she goes thru a crisis.  I wish that the second conflict mapped onto a cause in the girl's life or choices, but you can't have everything.

Popular scriptwriting advice today, which is probably based on something Syd Field wrote, is that each script has to have 3 plot points, at exactly one-fourth, one-half, and three-fourths of the way thru the movie.  Some readers expect to see these points on pages 25, 50, and 75 of a 100-word script, which is stupid, but that's what I hear they teach now.

I think the people who claim this and watch a movie stopwatch in hand (this is a good idea if you want to write) tend to grab whatever big event happened closest to their desired marks and call them the plot points.  I think this movie had 4 or 5 main plot points, not 3; the first 2 happened pretty quickly; and the "realization" point (where the main character realizes what the story is actually about) didn't happen until somewhere shortly before the final plot point, IIRC.

Pretty early on I started feeling sorry for Sadness, and then wondering what they were going to do with this character.  They went pretty much where I thought they should with that, which of course means they did exactly the right thing.  :)

It was a lot of goofy yet not meaningless fun, and a couple of moments so poignant it’s hard to believe they’re in an American movie.  The scene where Joy is surrounded by once-treasured childhood memories, silently replaying themselves as they fade and then crumble into dust, is something I’d have expected from Miyazaki.  The one soon after that--you’ll know it when you see it--is the saddest scene Pixar’s ever made, or at least would have been with better character development.  It’s short of Old Yeller territory, but still something most people won’t want their 4-year-olds to see.

The film’s message is pretty daring for a kid’s movie.  I think the best recommendation for the film is the number of hateful 1-star reviews on IMDB.com from parents angry that their children were exposed to ideas:

This movie intends to chip away at the innocence of little girls, forcing them to mentally confront things which they should not be thinking about...   I expected to see more negative symbolism and/or propaganda, and there's a hint of feminist propaganda, but mostly it just is what it is, a movie designed to MIND-RAPE your children! This movie was made by the same "liberal" types that want to teach Kindergarteners about anal sex in public schools...

PLEASE! Don't expose your children to this! PS - My children were not exposed to this filth because I have taken the precaution of pre-screening everything my children view…

Is it a kids’ movie, though?  Eight and up, sure.  Some of the jokes are only for adults.  Younger kids might not understand what’s going on, and might find some parts pretty upsetting.

It's funny, though probably not as funny as Toy Story.  Its one great failing is that it has no memorable characters.  But it has a fast pace, and some big ideas and metaphors.  Toy Story gave kids a lot of funny lines and a toy merchandise bonanza.  Inside Out gives them a different way of thinking about people and about their emotions.