Thanks to an Aulner family reunion last week, my immediate family and some relatives from out of town were fortunate enough to go see Pixar’s latest production, Inside Out. To cut to the chase, I’ll open by saying that Inside Out is the first movie since 2010′s heartwarming Toy Story 3 that actually felt like a Pixar film. Don’t get me wrong, Cars 2 isn’t a bad movie, per se, nor are Brave or Monsters University. Unfortunately, these films all lacked the sheer exuberance and creativity that has distinguished virtually every previous Pixar Studios endeavor from its competitors.

At last, the greatest studio in computer-generated animated films has returned to its position as king of the proverbial hill. The studio that made you cry for a band of toys, root for a clownfish searching for his lost son, and laugh at the exploits of a superheroic family struggling to adapt to suburbia has ditched the heavy-handed storytelling of the Cars films and the mediocrity of Brave and Monsters University (mediocre at least in comparison to their Pixar predecessors) to bring us Inside Out, a delightfully  zany, visually splendid, and emotionally complex film that, like the best Pixar films, can be enjoyed by both children and adults.

Inside Out follows five emotions that includes Joy (Parks and Recreation‘s Amy Poehler), Sadness (The Office‘s Phyllis Smith), Fear (SNL’s Bill Hader), Anger (stand-up comedian Lewis Black), and Disgust (another Office actress, Mindy Kaling), who all work together to manage the mind of Riley Anderson, a preteen girl from Wisconsin. As Riley goes through life, she has different memories, which are stored as orbs with the color of whichever emotion the memory is tinged with (golden for Joy, blue for Sadness, and so on); thanks to her happy-go-lucky childhood, friendships, healthy family life, and hockey aspirations—those Wisconsinites, you know–, Riley’s emotions are predominantly postive, making Joy the de facto leader of the emotions within Riley’s mind.

Unfortunately, due to their natural differences, Joy and Sadness don’t work well together. Joy doesn’t understand where Sadness fits into Riley’s normally happy personality, and Sadness consequently feels left out. After Riley and her parents move to San Francisco, the young girl experiences a difficult first day at school and creates a “core memory” (i.e. a memory that forms a new aspect of her personality); however, this is the first sad core memory Riley’s mind has ever created, so Joy tries to stop from being stored. The ensuing chaos strands both Joy and Sadness outside of the emotions’ headquarters. The rest of the film follows the efforts of the two main emotions to return to the HQ of Riley’s mind before her personality erodes completely.

While this may sound like a big lecture in psychology and (thanks to Riley’s young age) pediatrics, it’s actually very easy to follow along thanks to the film’s explanatory visuals and well-written script, which make the story’s key concepts easy to comprehend for anyone, even if they’ve never heard of Sigmund Freud or Benjamin Spock.

As for the cast, I have nothing but praise for them, especially Amy Poehler’s delightful performance as the effervescent Joy and Phyllis Smith’s portrayal of Sadness’s inherently melancholy nature. Of course, Pixar regular John Ratzenberger makes his obligatory cameo, this time as a “mind worker” named Fritz, and Spin City‘s Richard Kind has an important role later in the film as the lovably goofy Bing-Bong, Riley’s imaginary friend from childhood.

Thanks to the strength of its plot and characters, its humorous dialogue, and its wondrous imagery, which put many mental concepts into interesting visual forms, Inside Out is the latest and greatest Pixar film, a movie that hopefully signals a return to the shining pinnacle of cinema that Pixar stood at a mere five summers ago. And I’m no Oscar expert, but I’m calling it six months in advance: Inside Out will win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.