Riley Andersen's move from Minnesota to San Francisco throws her mental control room into crisis when Joy and Sadness are accidentally flung from headquarters, forcing them to find their way back through the wreckage of her long-term memory. Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen's Pixar feature spends five personified emotions and a five-and-a-half-year production trying to dramatise, rather than explain, why a child needs to be allowed to feel bad.
Joe Gardner, a middle-school band teacher on the verge of his first real break as a jazz pianist, falls into a coma and finds his soul on the way to the Great Beyond, prompting a scramble to get back to his body paired with an unwilling mentee soul named 22 who has never wanted to be born. Pete Docter's Pixar feature, co-written and co-directed by Kemp Powers, spends four years of production building an afterlife bureaucracy in order to undercut the very idea, common to Docter's own earlier films, that a person needs a defining passion to justify their existence.
A widower ties thousands of balloons to his house and flies to South America to fulfil a promise made decades earlier, only to find an uninvited child stowaway waiting on his porch. Pete Docter's 2009 film pairs one of animation's most quoted opening sequences with an adventure plot that keeps circling back to grief.