USA. 2024.
Crew
Director – Kelsey Mann, Screenplay – Dave Holstein & Meg Lefauve, Story – Meg Lefauve & Kelsey Mann, Producers – Mark Nielsen, Photography – Adam Habib & Jonathan Pytko, Music – Andrea Datzman, Visual Effects Supervisor – Sudeep Rangaswamy, Animation Supervisors – Dovi Anderson & Evan Bonifacio, Production Design – Jason Deamer. Production Company – Pixar Animation Studios.
Voices
Amy Poehler (Joy), Maya Hawke (Anxiety), Kensington Tallman (Riley Andersen), Phyllis Smith (Sadness), Liza Lapira (Disgust), Lewis Black (Anger), Ayo Edibiri (Envy), Tony Hale (Fear), Lilimar (Valentina Ortiz), Adele Exarchopoulos (Ennui), Grace Lu (Grace), Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green (Bree), Diane Lane (Mom), Kyle MacLachlan (Dad), Paul Water Hauser (Embarrassment), Yvette Nichole Brown (Coach Roberts), James Austin Johnson (Pouchy), Ron Funches (Bloofy), Yong Yea (Lance Slashblade)
Plot
Riley Andersen is selected to go away to a special hockey camp. The morning that she is due to go, the emotions are woken up by an alarm going off – that of Puberty. The control room is immediately renovated by a work team and a series of new emotions – Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment and Ennui – are introduced. As Riley heads off to camp, Anxiety becomes obsessed with Riley making friends with Valentina Ortiz, the girl she admires, and being selected for the team. As Joy tries to keep the focus positive, Anxiety regards her and the others as a distraction and ejects them from the control room to the back of the mind. There they try to find their way back as Anxiety and the new emotions direct Riley to abandon her old friends and become obsessed with fitting in with Valentina’s group and getting a place on the team.
Pixar Animation emerged in the 1990s with a string of hits that included Toy Story (1995), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), Cars (2006), Ratatouille (2007), Wall-E (2008) and Up (2009). The 2010s became a different story where their previous successes were watered down with inferior sequels where original material felt like it was few and far between. When it came, the studio’s original content seemed much lesser than their previous output – amiable but hardly shattering works like Brave (2012), The Good Dinosaur (2015), Onward (2020), Luca (2021), Turning Red (2022) and Elemental (2023). Among these, Inside Out (2015) was a breath of fresh air amid the creative wasteland of Pixar in the 2010s.
Now comes this sequel. Pete Docter has stepped away from the director’s chair, which is now taken by Kelsey Mann, previously a Pixar storyboard artist. Back also are most, although not all of the voice talents from the first film – Bill Hader and Mindy Kaling have both been replaced as respectively Fear and Disgust, while Riley is voiced by a different actor. Among the more eye-opening new names is French actress Adele Exarchopoulos, best known for the heavily X-rated lesbian film Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013), who voices Ennui.
I enjoyed Inside Out. There was an appealing originality to its central metaphor of the mind controlled by personified emotions. However, by the time that Inside Out 2 started, it felt like my control room had been taken over by its own sense of ennui. Maybe I was switched off from the very opening scenes setting a film around ice hockey, a sport I have zero enthusiasm for; maybe I was just in a negative state of mind that evening and the film’s happy upbeat message grated with me. I felt like I had zero engagement with wanting to watch a story about Riley as a teenager.
Inside Out 2 tries to introduce some new things. I quite liked the Puberty Alarm and the sudden demolition of the control room where all the reaction buttons are replaced with heightened sensitivity and a group of new emotions are introduced to take over. There are occasionally cute other bits – the introduction of the Sar-Chasm – and the ride down the Stream of Consciousness, something that was first done in The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D (2005). On the other hand, much of the film’s central idea and metaphor feels strained, especially about the point that it starts getting characters from Riley’s favourite tv shows come to life to provide aid and handy gadgets.
Inside Out was carried by the novelty of its central metaphor; by the time of Inside Out 2 that has become little more than an adventure story – the fantasy film trope of a group of people evicted from their seat of power and undergoing a series of trials and tribulations in the wilderness to find their way back and overthrow the usurper. It feels like a lot of the metaphor is now watered down to this end. Like most modern animation, the film is no more than a series of familiar characters whose adventures are extruded out with minor variations and dramatic contrivations.
Moreover, it also feels as though the film is soft-pedalling a lot of its themes. The issue of puberty seems merely skimmed over. I’m far from an expert on teenage girls but it seems to me that that is a time that a whole lot more issues are going on than merely moodiness – bodily changes, the beginning of menstruation, the awakening of sexuality and so on. The end the film arrives at where Riley’s screw-ups amount to no more than failing to properly screw the lid back onto a salt shaker and her big dark secret is that she burned the carpet, makes hers a life of terminal insipidity.
Really, I am kind of done with the adventures of Riley and her comfortable, well-loved middle-class existence. If Pixar wanted a real challenge for a sequel, why not give us a story about someone whose upbringing was less than happy and far removed from the wheelhouse of middle-class privilege – like a child raised in a ghetto whose choices not about getting onto the hockey team but seeing family members doing life for crime under Three Strikes and where options boiled down to between joining a gang or going to school. Or if you want to go really beyond the pale, why not take us in the mind of someone on the autism spectrum, with mental health issues or just someone who comes from a different culture altogether.
Trailer here