Taking an inventive look at complex issues

THE inner workings of a young girl's mind hardly seems to be a concept with enough lasting appeal to base a children's film around but then again, Pixar is one studio that knows how to get into the heads - and hearts - of an audience. Its latest film, Inside Out, manages the considerable feat of taking a thoughtful, sensitive and highly inventive look at issues both complex and essential - such as emotions and core memories - through cartoon characters that are somehow true to life.

Twenty years after its first feature film Toy Story burst into the collective consciousness, the team that also gave us modern-day classics like Finding Nemo (2003), Ratatouille (2007) and Up (2009) proves to be in fine fettle with Inside Out.

The film introduces us to the voices inside 11-year old Riley's head, presented in the form of five primary emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust. They inhabit a control tower and are responsible for different aspects of Riley's personality, sorting and storing a constant stream of colour-coded memory orbs that represent the girl's various moods. She's a typical happy child, until a family move from Minnesota to San Francisco initiates some alarming behavioural changes.