Gallery: Best Pixar Art Ever

Pixar Animation Studios' fifteenth feature film, Inside Out, opens in theaters across North America this weekend, and it's already receiving rave reviews from critics --- with an aggregate score at this writing of 99% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. It's expected to be another financial triumph for the company that George Lucas famously failed to see the value in!

In case you’ve missed the trailers or countless commercials, Inside Out is the story of a teenage girl named Riley and the five emotions in her head that attempt to help her navigate the stress and perils of growing up. The five emotions are voiced by a veritable murderer’s row of comedic TV talent with Joy, Anger, Sadness, Fear, and Disgust played by Amy Poehler, Lewis Black, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader, and Mindy Kaling respectively. The movie looks to be every bit as funny, clever, and touching as we’ve come to expect from Pixar.

Inside Out is the third directorial outing for Pete Docter (following Monster’s Inc. and Up) though he’s worked as part of the Pixar “braintrust” since before Toy Story and was crucial in its development. After production problems delayed the release of The Good Dinosaur from 2014, Pixar faced a year without a movie in theaters for the first time in seven years.

2014’s loss is our gain here in 2015, when we’ll get not one, but two Pixar movies in the same year that marks the twentieth anniversary of the release of Toy Story. We’re still waiting on the flying cars, hoverboards, and self-drying jackets that Back to the Future 2 promised we’d see in 2015, but two Pixar movies is a pretty good consolation prize while we wait.

It's with Inside Out’s release and the twentieth anniversary of Toy Story in mind that we take you through a visual celebration of Pixar’s history, including behind the scenes production art, promotional pieces, and fan creations. For good measure, we even threw in some production art from the only Pixar film to be scrapped completely, Newt, so that you’ll have some pointless trivia to bring up when you’re stuck in the theater this weekend waiting for the movie to start.