“Inside Out” opens Friday at Point, Palace, Star Cinema and Sundance Cinemas. PG, 1:34, four stars out of four.

And that’s why Pixar’s Pixar.

While there hasn’t been a Pixar movie I haven’t liked in the past few years ( okay, “Cars 2”), the animation studio once responsible for “Ratatouille” and “WALL-E” hasn’t put out anything essential in a while, anything that another animation studio like Dreamworks couldn’t have done.

That changes with the wonderful and ambitious “Inside Out.” It does exactly what we’ve come to expect from a great Pixar movie, which is to show us things we’ve never even dreamed of before — a balloon-powered house, a monster-scaring factory, a rat chef — and connect them so deeply to the human experience that they feel familiar somehow. It’s one of their very best.

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