Inside Out 2
PixarHas Pixar lost its magic, or has this critic aged out of Pixar? It’s a lingering question plaguing his mind for some time after Incredibles 2 became the studio’s best-ever sequel. Nothing else that came out after this – minus the incredibly creative Turning Red, which should’ve been released in cinemas – would top what Brad Bird and his team achieved, delivering an energetic and visually striking animated film that stimulates small and big children alike.
After returning to theatres in 2022 with their last three films relegated to streaming services, Pixar hit a massive slump with the disastrous Lightyear, which contained compelling animation treating one of their most unimaginative stories. Last year’s film, Elemental, also suffered the same fate, with the same beats retreated through allegorical characters representing the most powerful elements. It became a sleeper hit for the studio as it continued to play in theatres and was even nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards, but it didn’t hit as much as Turning Red would’ve had it been released on the big screen.
But Pixar longs to dominate the box office this weekend with Inside Out 2, the hotly-anticipated sequel to one of their greatest productions. The bar is high, and there’s no chance in hell that director Kelsey Mann and writers Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein would ever top the first one. The trio knows this and craft a story where Riley Andersen (Kensington Tallman) grapples with newfound emotions as she has just hit the ripe age of 13, where puberty begins.
Inside her mind, Joy (Amy Poehler) has crafted the perfect recipe to control Riley’s emotions, where her most embarrassing, saddest, or darkest memories are kept away in the ‘back of her mind,’ while Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Liza Lapira, replacing Mindy Kaling) and Fear (Tony Hale, replacing Bill Hader) modulate Riley’s feelings. However, as she hits 13, the ‘Puberty’ alert rings out – a clever visual gag – and new emotions suddenly appear.
Led by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), the new members, comprised of Envy (Ayo Edebiri, perfect), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos, an inspired casting choice unfortunately wasted in stereotypical clichés) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) make decisions to prepare Riley for her future, enrolling at a summer Hockey camp and making newfound friends, determining whether or not she will become part of the team and succeed in high school. But with anxiety taking control of Riley’s console and sidelining her most innate emotions, it’s setting a recipe for disaster, with Joy aching to return to Riley’s console and remind her of who she truly is.
It’s an interesting conceit that treats a massive change in our bodies with some verve and fun, but the emotional impact rarely hits compared to how profound the first one’s treatment of Riley’s path as a child was. It’s particularly unimpressive when teenhood gives a much broader canvas for the filmmakers to play with so many conflicting emotions in a way that makes Riley’s arc far more cogent and investing for the viewer because her mind is riddled with anxiety and envy, never knowing how to approach a situation, but desperate to impress or, more importantly, “fit in.”
Teenagers are unforgiving; their mood swings are incredibly difficult to handle for a parent who is still seeing their children as kids. This emotional detachment is something all parents – and, by extension, children – live through in one of the most challenging periods of their lives, since puberty lasts for a good while. Most teenagers live on the edge, which gives parents extra worry in figuring out exactly where they are positioned in their mind, while they fully understood them when they were children. In that instance, Mann cleverly cuts to the mind of Riley’s mother (Diane Lane), where her Anger sees that she’s changed, which they will now have to deal with “for the next ten years.”
That emotional shift is sudden but rife with incredible complexity that begs to be explored inside her mind. What happens when anxiety overrides her emotions and everything she has so far been enjoying about life is no longer here to guide her? There are not many interesting things, which is unfortunate since this should be a home run for a studio that knows how to dazzle visually and thematically. Mann only scratches the surface of what made the first film so memorable but can’t retain the same amount of emotional heft or cogency that would make this story resonate not only with teenagers but with all walks of life (especially through the presence of June Squibb as Nostalgia, the film’s most wasted emotion, where nothing of note is done with the character).
This is due in part to Joy, Anger, Sadness, Fear, and Disgust going on their own mini-adventure, while Envy and Anxiety take control of Riley’s emotions instead of having the two at odds with how her mind should operate (which would’ve been a conventional but logical scenario that could’ve been far more effective than what audiences are ultimately left with). This adventure has some memorable parts, including the emotions meeting with Riley’s “repressed memories,” including Bloofy (Ron Funches), a total parody of Dora the Explorer, who breaks the fourth wall to ask audiences what the character should do or if they can find the object on the screen (alongside his trusty pal Pouchy, terrifically voiced by Saturday Night Live’s James Austin Johnson).
It’s also the moment they meet with Lance Slashblade (Yong Yea), a Final Fantasy-esque character who navigates exactly how a video game protagonist in the early 2000s would. The animation work is particularly creative here, with Bloofy’s 2D animation style plucked straight out of a Dora episode, while the mechanics of Lance Slashblade results in the movie’s greatest visual gag. But they pale compared to the wonderful Bing Bong, which made us all cry out as he perished in the original movie. No side character is as thoughtfully written and acted as Richard Kind was in the first installment, no matter how creative some of the designs and jokes are.
It is a far better movie in terms of its animation, with enough striking images to warrant the price of an IMAX ticket. The hockey scenes are fast-paced and showcase just how detailed animation has gotten since the last movie, while a storm sequence is particularly bright and colorful to look at on the giant IMAX screen. Each frame brims with attention and care, ensuring the audience at least has their fill of terrifically constructed characters and images, even though the world of Riley’s mind itself lacks imagination.
Perhaps it’s by design since humans all grow to be less imaginative as they mature, but even the action sequences inside Riley’s mind don’t do much to tickle some wonder, which the first film always did. That said, a realistic depiction of a panic attack during a hockey game may be the most effective sequence of the entire movie, with Anxiety (literally, no figurative metaphor here) attacking Riley’s console to the point where her senses completely disorient her. It’s fairly harrowing to watch as someone who continues to suffer from massive anxiety and trauma, especially after last week’s Bad Boys: Ride or Die, which also contained a realistic anxiety attack through the figure of Will Smith’s Mike Lowrey.
But the movie never goes deep enough in its exploration of anxiety, either through the literal figure itself or through how its effects permeate on Riley. It seems more concerned with whatever her original emotions are doing than telling a real conflict of emotions, which is what puberty is all about. Mann has the conceit, but as soon as he has an idea that could be interesting to explore, he diverges to something more lighthearted than thoughtful, thereby removing the power that the emotions had in the first film and never fully dives into how Joy now perceives Riley as her body changes. Sure, she breaks down in one of the film’s most introspective moments but quickly gets back on her feet as if this scene never happened.
It also doesn’t help that the voice cast isn’t as memorable as in the last film, with Black and Smith giving the best turns as Anger and Sadness. But Poehler doesn’t seem as invested as she was as Joy nine years ago, and the shift between Hader/Hale, Kaling/Lapira is incredibly apparent and disconcerting. As far as the new emotions are concerned, Edebiri (predictably) comes out on top, while Hawke’s portrayal of anxiety is entertaining for the first five minutes, but immediately becomes grating upon realizing that it’s evolving in an uninspired and clichéd direction.
Instead of reflecting upon an individual’s changing emotions, as Pete Docter brilliantly did so in the original, Mann always takes the easy route with his story, which renders most of its thematic underpinnings predictable and less impactful than in the first film. As a result, Inside Out 2 feels more like a direct-to-video Disney film audiences would regularly see in the 1990s than a proper sequel to one of the greatest animated movies of the past decade. The advancement in technology can’t be overstated – the film looks far better than the original – but it’s not enough to enthuse audience members who long for a story as powerful as the original. Knowing that the original would never be topped, Mann had the golden opportunity to do something different, a film that completely subverted pre-conceived expectations of what an Inside Out 2 could be. Instead, he prefers to be safe without ever questioning an experience we all will or have gone through in our lives.
It could’ve been the perfect moment to explain puberty and its effects, but its surface-level exploration is a start. However, it remains unfulfilling as it’s never fleshed out enough for a feature-length film, leaving audiences with a fairly hollow and disappointing sequel that could’ve brought back Pixar to its glory days, especially after Docter won an Oscar for the first movie in 2016. Alas, it’s yet another forgettable and uneventful entry in their canon, making it seem like they are still suffering from a massive identity and storytelling crisis than a critic growing out of a studio that has brought him some of the greatest animated movies ever crafted that forever changed the medium. Here’s hoping next year’s Elio will be their true return to storytelling form, rather than their return to box office dominancy with creatively bankrupt ‘content.’