Aged six and four, Amy Poehler’s sons aren’t quite old enough to properly articulate their emotions.

But Amy, who voices the character Joy in Pixar’s animation Inside Out, has found that her new film is great at getting them to open up about their feelings.

Inside Out takes place inside the head of a 11-year-old girl called Riley, with her five core emotions: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, each personified as characters working in her “control centre”.

Amy Poehler voices Joy in Inside Out
Amy Poehler voices Joy in Inside Out (Disney/Pixar)

“The film is filled with action and rough and tumble, sucking up tubes and things falling down and breaking, and Anger blowing his top, so they love all that stuff,” the actress explained. “But it’s also a nice tool to talk to them about feelings.

“You can’t ask a child ‘How are you feeling, really?’ They don’t say, ‘Well I’m feeling sad…’ It doesn’t work that way – God bless you if you have that child.

“It’s been a way of discussing emotions and feelings with them in a way they like, that’s fun and feels safe.”

Amy Poehler
Amy Poehler (Jordan Strauss/AP)

The 43-year-old also admitted that it was sometimes healthy for joy to give way to sadness.

“Sadness can be your friend, it can help you,” she pointed out. “Happy is a really vague term; happiness and the pursuit of it. The film reminds us that it’s OK to not be happy all the time, no one is, and in fact, the pursuit of happiness all the time often gets in the way of change and growth.”

The comedian added: “There’s a great scene in the film where Joy has to relent and let Sadness take over. It’s this message of, you have to feel your feeling to get to the next thing. You need a good cry sometimes, and the film is a good cry.”

Could she have played any of the other emotions?

“I think I could do Anger,” she joked. “I think I could rustle that up if I needed to.”

Inside Out is in cinemas now.