Frankly, this doesn't feel like a review of Inside Out. You're just trying to justify the existence of a Wreck-It-Ralph review you made that got a lot of flack.
While I agree the review could be *stronger* without the Wreck-It Ralph comparisons, I wouldn't say it is completely overwhelmed by them.
I didn't see it as being explicitly aimed towards either sex, really. A kid dealing with change in her life is understandable to almost any adolescent, adult, or pre-adolescent. Joy and Sadness being the two main protagonists just seems like something that naturally followed from the plot.
That said, the success of this and Frozen and The Hunger Games and the video game Life is Strange proves that female protagonists can be a big hit with male audiences as well as female audiences.
I agree, we need to tear apart these gender frontier.
Imho, the best part of Inside out is the depiction of depression : Joy and Sadness are cast away :)
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Is it Fair to Call Something Emotionally Manipulative When That is the Premise?
In a previous review, I negatively compared Wreck It Ralph to Toy Story. There is a gulf of difference between the intuitive and simple story telling of the latter, and the needlessly convoluted nature of the former. Now I am going to positively compare Inside Out to Wreck It Ralph. Inside Out is Pixar's most abstract story by far. Continuing the "X are sentient" formula from previous movies, this time we have pure human emotions as X. I can just imagine how awkward it must have been to pitch this as a children's movie to a producer; on paper it sounds more like a weird sci-fi novel than a movie for children.
Unlike Wreck It Ralph, which had to contrive a bunch of complex and contradictory rules to make its setting and story function, Inside Out's personification of the human brain feels a lot more intuitive. It is easy to buy the idea that our decisions are guided by emotions, or that emotions (quite literally) colour our memories. Meanwhile, things like "memory trains" and a film industry for dreams feel familiar and almost Dr Seussian. The result is that we are provided with a bright, bizarro world that still makes sense. To an adult, anyway. I can't see kids really getting the nitty gritty details about cognition and memory, but that doesn't matter because they only need brightly coloured blobs with facial expressions and emotive music to get the gist.
Inside Out is about the importance of the role of emotion in our development and continued survival in society. It is an unabashably sentimental and uncynical film that portrays every person as a bunch of internal monologues and conflicting emotions. It is a conceit that does a masterful job of connecting with its viewers too - I teared up a couple of times, and there was one point where the audience around me were wailing. It doesn't ever achieve Up's level of catharsis, but it gives it a really good try.
It feels like it is the first Pixar movie that is explicitly aimed towards women, what with its predominantly female characters and its appeal (note: I am trying to be as cautiously democratic about this as I can) towards feminine interests. Pixar has made a brave attempt to step away from its more safer properties, and the result is something particularly rewarding.