Pixar’s Inside Out will be in theaters in exactly two and a half weeks. Understandably, fans from all over are on pins and needles to see how Pixar can climb out of the creative slump that defined its previous efforts. Fortunately, I’m happy to report that they might have done just that!

The following opinions you are about to read are of those who saw the film when it was screened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Needless to say, just about everyone likes what they saw (quotes courtesy of Screen Rant).

From Steve Pond of The Wrap:

Docter, whose previous work directing “Up” and “Monsters Inc.” place him near the very top of Pixar’s extraordinary stable of directors, has figured out how to pull off a daunting concept, and in the process made a movie as thematically daring as it is emotionally moving.

From Edward Douglas of Coming Soon:

As we’ve come to expect from Pixar, Inside Out is another gorgeous, colorful film that often makes you forget you’re watching animation. Inside Out is a bittersweet look at childhood’s end that might be Pixar’s most layered and complex film since Ratatouille.

From Gregory Ellwood of HitFix:

The dramatic elements of “Inside Out” will stick with you, but don’t fear. The humor is palpable… And when Docter depicts the emotions in people outside Riley’s family? It only serves to answer the main question we asked at the beginning of this review. You can make a coherent, entertaining and moving experience out of this concept as a feature length film and it can be very, very good.

From Peter Debrunge of Variety:

[In] execution, Pixar’s 15th feature proves to be the greatest idea the toon studio has ever had: a stunningly original concept that will not only delight and entertain the company’s massive worldwide audience, but also promises to forever change the way people think about the way people think, delivering creative fireworks grounded by a wonderfully relatable family story.

From Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian:

This movie is a sweet-natured coming-of-age comedy, a kind of tween-transition crisis, though with a fundamentally sunny Disneyfied worldview. It hasn’t anything as genuinely emotionally devastating as Up, or the subtlety and inspired subversion of Monsters Inc. and the Toy Stories which it certainly resembles at various stages. But it is certainly a terrifically likeable, ebullient and seductive piece of entertainment, taken at full-throttle.

From Jessica Kiang of Indiewire:

Pretty to look at (the real world segments especially are among the loveliest animations the studio have ever done) the film is not quite the perfection of Pixar’s greatest output but no matter how much you may put your dukes up to a movie so shamelessly manipulative, you will be disarmed. Not only because the film is so overtly about emotional manipulation, but also because, for all the Disneyfication of Pixar that we fear… “Inside Out” is not just fun and breezy, it’s also truly weird and wicked smart in its thoroughly heartfelt conclusions.

And finally, Donald Clarke of Irish Times:

A Numbskulls for the digital generation, Inside Out is funny enough, sweet enough and wise enough to sit in an adjacent room to Up and WALL-E. It is not in the same class as those films, but the team is clearly back on the right road.

As you can tell, pretty much every review in this set had great things to say. Even the ones who didn’t count it among one of Pixar’s best still thought of it as an imaginative thrill of a film.

If these reviews and others are any indication, it seems that Pixar has become gold again, simply by doing what it once did best. By way of giving Pete Doctor the director’s chair, they have succeeded in reaching back into the elements of Pixar’s best films and reassembling them into a wonderful and satisfying comeback.

Welcome back, Pixar.