INSIDE OUT (2015)

Last year’s Pixar hit looks like a ‘lock’ for all the major feature animation awards; deservedly so. A clever anthropomorphized brain scan of the emotional ‘humours’ warring inside the head of 12-yr-old girl just uprooted from her happy Minnesota life when Dad moves the family to San Francisco, it’s sweetly comic, touching & wildly imaginative. Perhaps a bit relentlessly so. You can all but feel the weekend pressure to come up with something awesomely creative for writer/director Pete Docter at the Monday morning staff meeting. (That visual degradation sequence earned someone major bonus points.)  Still, very entertaining stuff even when it could use a few more belly laughs. (The best gag in the pic shows over the end credits with a peek inside a kitty cat head.) There’s a great vocal cast handling each emotion (Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Phyllis Smith, the superbly self-sacrificing Richard Kind). Though Amy Poehler, with the toughest assignment carrying the pic as Ms. Goody-Two-Shoes ‘Joy,’ might have leaned less toward Ellen DeGeneres panicky accommodation and more in the direction of Doris Day sunshine. (Also on this disc, LAVA, a mating fable about a couple of animated serenading volcanoes, and the strangest idea for a short in Pixar history.)

DOUBLE-BILL: Woody Allen did something of a live-action INSIDE OUT, to side-splitting effect, in the last chapter of his hit-and-miss adaptation of EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX/’72. Hardly Family Friendly in the normal sense (it’s about getting an erection), high school kids should watch when the parental units aren’t around.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: We’ve mentioned this before, but horror aficionados hear the words Inside/Out and think of radio’s all-time creep-out from a LIGHTS OUT episode: THE DARK. The chilling tale of a haunted house where all the victims are turned . . . INSIDE OUT. Shut off the lights; hit the PLAY button and hold on till the final gruesome sound effect to hear a man turned inside out! Yikes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?