Inside Out is an ambitious and complicated film which falls flat on its face, unfortunately, without the involvement of a banana skin or similar comedic device to relieve the tedium.

I had great hopes for this film. The concept was intriguing – a story set inside the mind of Riley, a girl reaching the end of childhood, but not yet an adolescent. When Riley’s family moves from the familiar surroundings of rural Minnesota to the stone-clad streets of San Francisco, her emotions step up to the challenge of helping her cope, only to find themselves involved in an increasingly desperate struggle for survival as Riley’s relationships with her parents and the wider world starts to disintegrate.

The emotions - Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust - are based in head-quarters. Their role is to control Riley’s behaviour and create memories. Somewhere along the way, the emotions lose control as, it seems, Riley has a mind of her own. In desperation, Joy and Sadness realise that their only option is to leave the safety of head-quarters and venture into the ‘terra incognita’ of Riley’s long term memory – a cross between a theme park and a very large collection of marbles – in search of a solution.

Inside Out is essentially a set of extended metaphors that are flogged within an inch of their convoluted lives. I don’t know whether Inside Out appeals to children, but by the middle of the film, this adult was feeling distinctly bored.

Inside Out follows the archetypal Pixar formula: something goes wrong, and an ensemble cast of brightly-coloured small things with big personalities try to sort it out. While A Bug's Life and Toy Story dealt with external problems (losing your tribute for a band of marauding grasshoppers, or becoming separated from your owner respectively), Inside Out presents a rather more existential conflict.

In the world of Inside Out, humans are operated via control panels, by emotions personified. The image of tiny people working out of a person's head might ring some bells for anyone who read The Beano (The Numskulls, anyone?), and the main drive of the film is when two of the operatives become locked out of the control room. Unable to operate the console, their human (Riley) is rendered unable to feel Joy or Sadness.

There are many things that the film does well. It's bursting with ideas, and logic worthy of The Phantom Tollbooth. As we've come to expect from Pixar, characters who are only on screen for a couple of lines ooze with personality, like they're in some sort of personality-oozing contest. But that's not to say that the film is flawless.

For a child, I think the film might be borderline terrifying. The forays into the structure of Riley's mind are surreal, but not in the structured, madcap way that characterises children's television. Mechanical islands float over an apparently endless abyss. Crumbling cliffs house towering shelves of multicoloured orbs, around which nameless workers shuffle, picking off memories destined for destruction. At one point, they visit the studio where nightmares are filmed. At another, characters wandering into abstract thought are almost deconstructed. It's really quite menacing. Coupled with the strangely high body-count of the film (at one point, several hundred cloned imaginary boyfriends are deliberately manufactured to fall into the abyss) it feels positively unsettling.

In terms of the narrative structure, the crisis (losing Joy and Sadness) happens very early on, while the resolution (regaining Joy and Sadness) happens very late. The vast majority of the film is spent in the state of turmoil and jeopardy. As things go wrong (and get worse), and every step forward is met with an obstacle or four, it feels more like a nightmare than an adventure. Thanks to Pixar's skilful storytelling, we do empathise with the characters - and because the threat is so immediate, the stakes so high, the film might be an upsetting experience for younger audience members.

On a conceptual level, there is uncertainty. At the beginning of the film, the internal characters are consistently aligned with their eponymous feelings. Disgust is dismissive. Anger is livid. Joy seems to be having a manic episode. As the film progresses, however, they start to show other dimensions - Sadness appears to be happy. Anger appears to be nervous. What does that mean to the system? (Also, are the humans just shells, automata controlled by a panel and a joystick? If so, why are they presented with a storyline of their own? Why are we asked to sympathise with them?)

While it's refreshing to have a film where the message is that sadness has a place on the emotional spectrum (a bold message for an American kid's film...), I think the overwhelming message that children may take away is that the mind is a terrifying place. Yes, it's brightly-coloured, but it's more Ed Paschke than Toys'R'Us.