The folks at Pixar are great world builders. It’s been one of their primary strengths since the halcyon days of that original 10-or-so film run starting with 1995’s “Toy Story.”
They create striking new universes, and populate them with delightful details. Pixar has historically been so good at creating original worlds, in fact, that it makes their more recent trend toward sequels doubly disappointing.
With the exception of the “Toy Story” films, Pixar’s franchise extensions have arguably been among their least inventive and essential works. This was my trepidation walking into “Inside Out 2.” Did we really need to go back to this well?
The film takes place largely inside the head of a young girl. Riley Andersen (voiced by Kensington Tallman) has just hit puberty, a crisis for the emotions who reside inside her mind — Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), Sadness (voiced by Phyllis Smith), Anger (voiced by Lewis Black), Fear (voiced by Tony Hale) and Disgust (voiced by Liza Lapira).
They’re joined by a whole new set of emotions: Embarrassment (voiced by Paul Walter Hauser), Ennui (voiced by Adele Exarchopoulos), Envy (voiced by Ayo Edebiri) and particularly Anxiety (voiced by Maya Hawke), who kicks the “old emotions” out of Riley’s internal control tower and takes the reins, with often disastrous results.
I’ll confess that I went into “Inside Out 2” with a certain amount of skepticism because the first film isn’t among my favorites of Pixar’s output. The central metaphor of both “Inside Out” films — the human mind as a literal control room, where various emotions are given a turn at the wheel — has always struck me as “too clever by half.”
Where the best Pixar films come out of a years-long development process feeling effortless, “Inside Out” seems a bit over-workshopped, the complex layering of metaphors a bit belabored. These are children’s films that often feel designed by clinical psychologists; they function more like therapeutic manuals than satisfying stories.
“Inside Out 2” has an additional setback “against” it in that the surprise of the first film is gone. Instead of forging new ground, it feels like the Pixar crew are going back to familiar territory, “playing the hits.”
As in the first film, Riley’s central emotions (Joy and Sadness in the first film, all of the “core” emotions in this one) get kicked out of the control tower and stranded in the wastelands of Riley’s mind. As in the first film, there’s jokes about Riley’s childhood interests slowly being pushed to the background as she moves toward adulthood. As in the first film, there’s a sequence where characters are stuck at the bottom of a vast crevice filled with abandoned memories (pictured as glowing, colorful orbs).
Poehler’s Joy has basically the same character arc in both films, belatedly realizing that Riley is becoming a more complex and contradictory person than the sweet little girl Joy once knew.
“Inside Out 2” is structurally almost the same film as the first. All the things that worked in the first movie get trotted back out, slightly retooled so that they’re technically something different.
But if the broad strokes of “Inside Out 2” feel at times over familiar, the specifics are nonetheless captivating.
Voicing Anxiety, Hawke is quite good — like Joy was in the first film, she’s an antagonist without really being a “villain” — and the design of the character is effective as well, “cutely off putting” if such a thing is possible. (The cartoon embodiment of “anxiety” probably shouldn’t be something you want to cuddle up with.)
For every gag that feels belabored, there’s another that’s inspired. I particularly enjoyed the running gag involving a video game character from Riley’s childhood whose attempts at heroism prove largely ineffectual.
And if the message of the first film for kids was, in essence, “being sad is OK,” the final movement of “Inside Out 2” similarly carries a potent message for children: that as they get older, they’ll make mistakes and at times lose their way, but that that doesn’t make them unworthy of love.
The various verbal and visual puns throughout “Inside Out 2” (the “sar-chasm” that splits Riley’s psyche apart as she becomes surly and uncommunicative, the “Puberty Alarm” that starts ringing as Riley begins to change) can feel strained, but the main image of the film’s climax — a visual metaphor of Joy embracing Riley in her totality, both her best and worst aspects, no less valuable for being fragile — is as simple, immediate and potent an image as Pixar has ever created.
Was it worth going back to this well? For the catharsis that climactic image provides, I’d say it was.
C.B. Jacobson is an Annandale native who makes independent films at Buddy Puddle Productions, and writes about movies at picturegoer.substack.com. Keep an eye peeled for him at the Emagine Monticello movie theater on Tuesday nights — seated in the middle of the auditorium, with a book in hand.
At a glance
What: “Inside Out 2,” PG
Director: Kelsey Mann
Starring: Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, Lewis Black
Running time: 96 minutes
Rating: ★★★½
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