On what made Pixar's Inside Out (2015) a remarkable piece of formal thinking about emotional experience.

Inside Out is a film about the emotions of an eleven-year-old girl, personified as characters who operate her mind from a control center in her head. This conceit is familiar from the history of animation, but what Pete Docter did with it is not.

The film's formal argument — and it has one — is that sadness is not the enemy of joy but its companion. The two emotions cannot be separated because what makes something joyful is its contingency, its potential loss. The film's central image is a memory that is both joyful and sad simultaneously, which is the film's thesis made visible.

What makes Inside Out remarkable beyond its emotional intelligence is that it handles a major developmental transition — the loss of childhood — with formal precision. The Islands of Personality that collapse as Riley struggles are not metaphors for a depression. They are an accurate, non-clinical representation of what it feels like to be a child moving into adolescence: the structures of meaning that organized your inner life simply stop working, and something new hasn't yet formed to replace them.