Corey Atad’s review published on Letterboxd:
I wrote a bit about the brilliant conceptual bidness at work in this movie, over here.
But fuck that conceptual noise. Let's talk about how Inside Out is not actually that great. It's good. That's it. A charming amusement. Some jokes are funny, some gags are clever, the vocal performances are pretty spot-on. It's fine. But it's not more than fine, and the problem, as I see it, is an unwillingness to stretch its conceptual strength outside of mere illustration. Thinking about the ideas at work in the movie makes me tear up, but the movie itself never did.
It's all too literal, and as a result the characters don't feel like characters and the message becomes obvious way before the characters ever pick up on it, which makes them look stupid. The movie makes you feel bad for Sadness right off the bat, which is pretty lame storytelling considering we're supposed to learn the value of sadness over the course of the journey. It makes for a movie where all I could do was look at my watch and anticipate Joy getting her head out of her ass.
Maybe a short film would've been better? No, a short film definitely would've been better. Why the hell couldn't they have made this one a short instead of forcing us to sit through that Lava monstrosity???
Ah well, Up is still a damn masterpiece.