Commercially and greatly critically successful on release, it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and was nominated for Best Original Screenplay.

The AFI and National Board of Review named it One of The Top 10 Films of 2015.

Critical reviews for the film are largely positive, with major praise for its story, plot, scriptwriting, themes, storytelling, originality, visuals and animation and performances with Kenneth Turan (Los Angeles Times) and Peter Debruge (Variety) claiming it to be one of Pixar’s best and, along with with Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter, viewing it as a “sophisticated” and “audacious” film and one which, as David Edelstein of Vulture considered, marked a “new pop-culture touchstone”.

Many critics marked Inside Out as one of the Top 10 Films of 2015, ranking it overall at #4 and since then The New York Times, Empire, the BBC and The Independent have praised it as one of the greatest films of the twenty-first century. Moreover, it has been considered as one of the best films of the 2010s and one of the best animated films of all time by many publications including the Los Angeles Times, Time Out London and Time Out New York as well as its screenplay being listed as #29 in the Writers Guild of America’s “101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century (So Far)”.

Today, it stands on Rotten Tomatoes at 98% and its critical consensus reads as: “Inventive, gorgeously animated, and powerfully moving, Inside Out is another outstanding addition to the Pixar library of modern animated classics.”