The new Pixar film, “Inside Out,” is about the life of Riley. She is an only child (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias) who, aged eleven, moves with her parents (Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan) from Minnesota to San Francisco. Not much happens: she attends a new school, tries out for the hockey team, and misses her old home. That’s it. No talking cars or robots are involved, and there’s not a superhero in sight. The bulk of the movie takes place out of sight, within the confines of Riley’s mind, where primary feelings affect her every move. There are five in all: Joy (Amy Poehler), who is butter-yellow and fuzzy at the edges; Anger (Lewis Black), who looks like SpongeBob soaked in blood; Fear (Bill Hader), a writhing dweeb with a bow tie; Disgust (Mindy Kaling), who has frosted green hair and lashes; and Sadness (Phyllis Smith), a bespectacled blob of blue. Now and then, they contend for supremacy, but mostly they join forces and react to the world beyond. They behold it through Riley’s eyes, from a spiffy control center, like Kirk, Spock, and the gang on the bridge of the Enterprise.

Joy and the others are not alone. Around them stretches the vast landscape of Riley’s consciousness, with a train of thought puffing through it at irregular intervals, and other characters wandering about, such as Bing Bong (Richard Kind), an imaginary friend from Riley’s past, who weeps candies, and an imaginary, floppy-haired boyfriend from her future (“I would die for Riley,” he says). Dreams are produced in—where else?—a dream factory, with soundstages and camera crews. It closes down when she wakes. Experiences are delivered to the control room as if they were bowling balls, colored according to their mood; some are stored away, others dropped into a pit of forgetfulness, where they darken and crumble like spent coals, and a few are enthroned as core memories. And that, we are told, is how a personality is made.

So brisk is the defining of all this, and so efficiently does the director, Pete Docter, give us the guided tour, that we barely pause to consider the assumptions behind it. Pixar, though part of Disney, has no time for old-school habits, like lodging the emotions in the heart: a superfluous organ, it would seem. They are located squarely in the brain, presumably displacing Reason, whom we never meet, but whom I picture as French, bald, and wearing an English suit. The presence of Disgust—rather than Boredom, say, or a bristling Envy (which Riley would certainly need if she had a sibling)—points to a fastidiousness that has typified Pixar from the start. Joy is very much the captain of the team, but, as events unfold, Sadness comes to the fore, demonstrating that it’s O.K., and maybe even helpful, to feel low. Neurologists and therapists will examine the movie and pronounce themselves largely satisfied. Has the studio ever supplied a more intensely American product, or one more guyed to the anxieties of middle-class aspiration? Five great islands dominate Riley’s psyche: Family, Honesty, Friendship, Hockey, and Goofball, better known as messing around. Each is vulnerable to threat; when Riley borrows her mom’s credit card without asking, the isle of Honesty flakes away. Riley also detests her new house, which looks like a perfectly nice property in a safe neighborhood, and she and her parents are mightily vexed by the late arrival of their stuff in the moving van. A similar vehicle, remember, figured in the climax of “Toy Story,” another tale of a childhood defined by its belongings. So much to worry about, in such an easy life!

On the scale of inventiveness, “Inside Out” will be hard to top this year. As so often with Pixar, you feel that you are visiting a laboratory crossed with a rainbow. Even through the graying veil of 3-D glasses, the sheen of the image is so acute that it aches, and the movie, aglow with domestic yearnings, should act upon viewers as “Meet Me in St. Louis” did in 1944. But who will those viewers be? And might they miss the clearer and less exhausting narrative flow of “Toy Story”? I saw Docter’s film with a sizable crowd, and noticed a definite rustle of impatience among the smaller kids during the more outré scenes—like the journey that Joy and her pals take through Abstract Thought, which flattens them first to 2-D geometric forms and then to mere lines. They emerge as random stars, as if in a Miró painting, before popping back into shape. Pixar’s vision of conceptual activity, in short, is a trip, and it sticks out like Dali’s dream sequences for Hitchcock’s “Spellbound.” I sensed, at such moments, that I was following the transcription, by very clever adults, of their own theorizing—literate, frantic, and endlessly chewed over—on the subject of human development, rather than the story of a growing girl.

That is why the biggest laughs, without exception, come when we exit Riley’s head and take a quick vacation to the crania—and the mania—of others. During an argument at dinner, for instance, her father’s emotions are miles away; all of them are watching a hockey game. And, as the closing credits approach, Docter, realizing that he has a pack of wild gags that have been kept leashed for too long, releases the lot in a flurry. We peek inside the mind of a dog, a cat, a prepubescent boy (“Girl! Girl!” the alarms sing out), and, best of all, the cool chick with eyeshadow at Riley’s school, voiced by Rashida Jones. (Mind you, I would die for Rashida.) You start to wonder what a grownup sequel to “Inside Out” would look like, with a host of new feelings barging into central command and wrenching the controls away from Joy. Would Lust be spoken by Rupert Everett, or would it sound more like Chico Marx, working his way through a chorus line? How about Love of Money, or black-browed Mortal Terror? There are places, I guess, where even Pixar cannot go.

Bulky and bearded, a man lies alone in the dark. Flesh bulges at his waistband. He stirs like a bear emerging from hibernation, and we wonder what troubles may have roused him. Handguns clutter a table beside him, as if they were coffee cups, and yet, even at this late hour, he takes the time to call his mother, and together they say a prayer. Such is the beginning of “Escobar: Paradise Lost,” directed by Andrea Di Stefano. The big man is Pablo Escobar, the pasha of an international drug trade. The name has dwindled, these days, but there was a time when it was larded with awe and dread. “Medellin, Colombia—June 18, 1991,” we read onscreen, and, just to prove it, Escobar’s portable phone is a kind of metal baguette.

He is played by Benicio Del Toro, who is seldom easy to cast, especially as a lead, for his pleasure is to sidle into the action from the wings, with his sly and drowsy gaze and the viscous slur of his voice. That is why he made more of an impact in the bit part of Fenster, in “The Usual Suspects,” than he did in four and a half hours, as the star of Steven Soderbergh’s “Che.” In “Escobar: Paradise Lost,” Del Toro has finally found a character who fits him, and if there is a temptation to revel so heartily in the role that it bursts at the seams, he resists it. Early on, a bunch of nervous guys sit awaiting Escobar, whose status is not far short of a myth. Rather than make an entrance, however, he comes into the room as if he were one of them, wearing soccer shorts and conversing quietly. Likewise, the only weapon that we see him fire is a water pistol, in his swimming pool; if there must be blood, he has hirelings to do the shedding. Del Toro’s whole performance is an education in the steady hum of power. Fear not the man who swaggers and rants, he suggests, but the man who has no need to do so.