Inside Out

Plot

Riley is a girl born in Minnesota. Five emotions live inside her head. They are responsible for her actions and make her memories. The memories are kept as balls. They each give a different color depending on the emotion of the memory. The most important memories are core memories that power islands of personality. 

They reflect a different aspect of Riley's life. Joy makes Riley happy. Fear keeps her safe. Disgust prevents her from being poisoned, physically and socially. Anger makes her life fair. Sadness however, doesn't seem to have a purpose. She's ignored as a result.

Riley turns eleven. Her parents move to San Francisco. Sadness has a magical touch. When she touches a memory, it turns sad and blue, and it can't be changed back to what it was before. Joy forbids Sadness from touching any more memories until she finds out what's going on.

The first day at the new school, Joy has Sadness stand inside a circle so she can't spread her gloominess. Riley talks about her life in Minnesota. Joy brings up a memory and has it played on a projector in Riley's head. Sadness wanders outside her circle and touches the memory, turning it sad. 

While the emotions are trying to remove the memory from the projector, Sadness takes control of the console, making Riley cry in front of her classmates. A new core memory is created. This core memory is sad and blue. Riley's only had happy core memories before. Joy sees sad memories as a bad thing. She tries to get rid of it. Sadness tries to stop her, saying it's a core memory. 

In their struggle, all the core memories are knocked from the holder they're kept in. Joy, Sadness and the core memories are sucked up the tube, into the far depths of Riley's mind.

Joy and Sadness are in Long Term Memory, a labyrinth of corridors of shelves of memories. They meet Riley's former imaginary friend Bing Bong, who's desperate to reconnect with Riley. He says the Train of Thought can take them back to Headquarters. Their journey takes them through Abstract Thought and Imagination Land. Parts of Preschool World are being demolished, Princess Dream World and the Stuffed Animal Hall of Fame. Mind workers are taking Bing Bong's song-powered rocket to the Memory Dump, a deep pit where obsolete memories are erased. 

A plow pushes the rocket into the dump. Bing Bong is really upset over the loss of his rocket. He's completely unresponsive when Joy tries to cheer him up. Sadness listens to what Bing Bong has to say. He and Riley had great adventures together. They were best friends. It's sad. Bing Bong hugs Sadness. He cries candy. He's okay now. He continues to take the emotions to the train station. Joy wonders how did Sadness do that?

Information sourced from imdb.com