“Say what you want, I think it’s all beautiful.”

“Do you ever look at someone and wonder: what is going on inside their head?” asks Joy at the start of Inside Out. The rest of movie plays out as an answer to that question. Even for a company as innovative as Pixar, it was an ambitious premise for an animated family film. But Pete Doctor and the rest of the Pixar team explored the complexities of the human psyche, gave personalities to emotions, and designed an elaborate world within the brain anyway… and were able to successfully present their psychological deconstructions with humor, visual splendor, and elegantly simple metaphors that even a kid could understand.

The film takes place in both the outside world — where we follow 11-year-old Riley as she adjusts to life in a new city — and the inside world of Riley’s brain. What happens outside affects what happens in. When she sees or otherwise perceives something, her emotions react to that stimuli in the brain’s “control room,” which is embodied as a lounge with a central control panel below a wide oval screen that lets her personified emotions see through Riley’s eyes at all times.

If the emotional reaction is strong enough, that moment or perception will turn into a memory, which appears in the control room as a orb colored with the primary hue of the emotion associated with the memory — yellow, blue, green, red, or purple for Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger, and Fear, respectively.

The most important memories of Riley’s entire lifetime are kept in a special container in the center of the control room; these “core memories” feed “personality islands” that can be viewed from the control room’s back window. Each personality island is covered with statues and imagery that represents the theme of that particular island: family, friends, goofiness, hockey, and so on. Riley’s personality is shaped by what is on these islands; they represent her values, interests, and individuality. Any memories that aren’t “core” are shipped off to long-term memory storage while Riley sleeps, where they are stored on tall stacks of purple-pink elliptical shelves that resemble the folds of the human brain. Long-term memory feels like a labyrinth: “you can get lost in there!”, Sadness reminds us.

The design of this inner world is orderly and elegant. The purpose behind each operation and structure in the brain is always crystal clear even as the story becomes more and more complex. Beyond memory and emotion, many theoretical concepts of the brain are presented with elegant, imaginative metaphors — there is the literal train of thought, representing Riley’s consciousness, which “kind of goes all over the place.” The subconscious is represented as an abyss where old emotions and memories go when they fade. A movie studio in Riley’s subconscious produces all of her weird dreams. Imagination is presented as a theme park filled with interactive structures and games.

All of this is visually stunning, and much of it is whimsical. But the time spent within that structured interior world of the Inside Out brain serves a higher storytelling purpose, too. This world-building is a theme unto itself; it serves as a reminder for adults and a lesson for children that our thoughts, feelings, memories, and behaviors are all connected.

That emotions are the protagonists of the brain and the gatekeepers of thoughts and memories is one of the movie’s most brilliant conceits, and the designs of those personified emotions are as elegant and brilliant as the design of the brain world that they inhabit. Anger is a short, stocky, grumpy red man whose head lights up with fire when he’s agitated. Disgust is a sassy green woman who rolls her eyes and talks with disdain. Fear is a skinny, buttoned-up purple fellow whose entire existence is anxiety, and it shows. Sadness is blue, slow-moving, and hunched-over; she wears glasses and a turtleneck over her round frame.

Joy is the leader of the group; she works tirelessly to make sure that Riley is happy at all times. The other emotions look to her for comfort. She is the most colorful character of them all, and literally radiates light from her body, which falls on everyone around her. Joy, more so than any other emotion, is contagious.

In one of the film’s opening scenes, Joy introduces us to each of her fellow emotions by telling us what they do best. It’s a radically beautiful way to talk about feelings, and a scene that introduces us to another one of the themes of Inside Out: every emotion serves a purpose.

Fear keeps us safe. Disgust keeps us from being poisoned, both “physically and socially.” Anger “cares very deeply about things being fair.” And Sadness… “well, I’m not actually sure what she does. And I’ve checked… there’s no place for her to go.” At least, that’s what Joy thinks of Sadness in the beginning. By the end of the film, Sadness is revealed to have one of the most important emotional roles of them all.

For most of the story, Joy spends much of her energy mitigating the negative emotional damage that her peers — especially Sadness — can cause Riley. Joy’s endless positivity sees no place for an emotion as draining as despair; at one point, she even asks Sadness to stand in the middle of a chalk circle all day so that she doesn’t ruin Riley’s first day of school.

Joy pursues this kind of mitigation to a lesser degree to the other emotions, too; as Riley’s family drives into San Francisco for the first time, Fear turns to Joy and says, “I sure am glad that you told me earthquakes are a myth, Joy — otherwise I’d be terrified right now.” Joy half-heartedly smiles, knowing for a fact that that’s not true, but happy that anxiety is being kept at bay. At the far end of the control panel, Anger reads a newspaper with a headline that reads, “FUTURE IS SHAKY!”

And, when Riley’s new home turns out to be a disappointment filled with chipped paint and dead rats, Joy tries to steer the ship away from Disgust and Anger by re-focusing Riley’s attention back to positive memories any way that she can.

Though the characters of Anger, Disgust, and Fear are generally presented as one-dimensional stereotypes, the film provides Joy and Sadness, the most important emotions, with genuine depth. Joy isn’t presented as naïve happiness, but in a more profound way, which ladders up to another one of the themes of Inside Out: Joy is the result of active choice, gratitude, determination, and positively reframing perspective in moments of conflicting emotion. As Riley falls asleep to a nightmare, Joy thinks on the fly and trades it out for a happy memory; “Don’t you worry,” Joy tells Riley in her dreams. “I’m gonna make sure that tomorrow is another great day.”

The purpose of Sadness, who is initially brushed off as useless, is revealed late in the movie in one of the film’s most emotionally powerful scenes. As Bing Bong processes the fact that Riley is moving on from memories of him as she grows up, Sadness is the only character who is able to comfort him. Inside Out thematically posits that Sadness is the key to empathy; recognizing Sadness in ourselves and others allows us to be vulnerable and to process the pain that we feel in difficult situations.

It’s a poignant reminder that though Sadness may sometimes feel like a useless emotion that gets in the way of our well-being, when it’s experienced healthily, it’s actually one of the most valuable emotions of them all.

All of these revelations help Riley grow, whether she realizes it or not. As Riley opens up to her parents at the end of the movie, she expresses vulnerability, cries, is hugged, and then emits a sigh of relief feeling safe in her parents’ arms. This creates her first bittersweet memory: an orb appears in her brain not just colored yellow or blue, but both hues intertwined.

Memories can be tied to both joy and sadness, anger and disgust, fear and joy. Adult emotions are a complex thing… and that’s okay.

Moments like this climactic scene make the story outside of Riley’s head emotionally compelling in its own right. The scenes set within the outside world, overall, provide us with a relatable, grounded, human framework by which we understand what’s happening in the inside world. Riley’s emotional journey, her relationship with her parents, and the humorous examination of life in San Francisco are all moving, well-written pieces of the larger story.

But in the end, it’s the world-building, design, and beauty of the scenes illuminating the inner workings of her mind that make Inside Out such a special movie.

This is arguably Pixar’s most experimental film. It’s full of metaphors and unexpected stylistic quirks. Consider the Abstract Thinking scene, for the most obvious example. Bing Bong leads Joy and Sadness through a “short cut” from Long-Term Memory to Imagination Land. They enter a machine labeled DANGER and are locked inside by oblivious maintenance workers. The regular visual aesthetics of every other scene are thrown out of the window for a brief moment halfway through the movie both for the sake of a humorous gag and to teach viewers about abstract thinking in a clear, whimsical, and… well, abstract… way.

The characters visually break down in four stages: non-objective fragmentation, deconstructing, two-dimensional, and non-figurative until they are reduced to abstract shapes in their primary color. Abstract Thinking leads them from memory to imagination by being broken into pieces and formed back together into something new; it’s the most meta moment in a film about deconstruction; the creative process is visualized creatively in this scene.

Bing Bong himself reminds us of the power of imagination; Riley may lose him in her subconscious as she grows up, but that lovable cotton-candy elephant — like the childhood spirit and wonder that he represents — should never be forgotten.

And finally, the tragic toppling of Goofball Island and its later, colorful reconstruction leaves us to ponder one more deconstruction: growing up often requires us to break down our personality and redevelop it in order to adapt to changing situations… but one of the most essential, rewarding things that we can do as we age is to hold on to those things that were so dear to us from the start. Self-confidence as an adult, after all, is partially about accepting the child within you wholeheartedly, and unashamedly owning all of the things that have always brought you Joy.