I grew up in an era when cartoons were a release from reality. The Tom and Jerry cartoons had dancing chairs and talking brooms. The coyote cartoons were long episodes of chase scenes where they got hit over the head with frying pans and fell over cliffs and no one died. Now cartoons don’t even look like cartoons anymore. The animation looks like real people and they deal with real emotional problems but yet they are still fun to watch. Who do we blame for this shift in entertainment?

The creative minds at PIXAR are at it again with their new movie called Inside Out. The company already managed to own 15 Oscars with movies about talking cars and a fish called Nemo. Now funny really ladies like Amy Poehler and Mindy Kaling play feelings explaining why a simple story about an emotional eleven year old can get us emotional too. Are you supposed to cry at a kid movie? Leave it to PIXAR to bring us where we have never been before; the inside of an eleven year old’s brain.  Who wants to go there anyway and have to deal with joy and sadness and any other hormonal changes a pre-teen is going through?

Blame all the new cartoon type movies on the work of Pete Docter who is the writer and director of this movie. By having his own eleven year old girl and seeing her go from a crazy care free child to being a emotional bomb ready to go off at any moment, he wrote this movie. He even did research and noticed that things like fear is a emotion that is there really to make you feel safe somehow. Anger is all about fairness making sure all is equally divided. PIXAR is a corporate cousin of Disney and Pete was one of the original 10 guys chosen to get PIXAR off and running.  While there he helped craft the bro-mace between a cowboy and a spaceman in Toy Story. The fighting Monsters under your bed. He was responsible for the heartbreaking 4 minute wordless tear jerker scene of a marriage in Up.

This is how PIXAR gets Oscars. Why does every Disney movie make us cry? Every sequence   is sketched by artists, clay models and finally animation. The PIXAR campus is a fun place designed by Steve Jobs to work complete with various restaurants, a pool and creative distinctive thematic offices. A real fun place to work.  The movie is about a little girl in a big world showing the rest of us we are not alone,

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