Inside Out 2
Pixar's getting anxious.
Riley (Kensington Tallman) is growing up. She’s just turned thirteen, she’s kind, she’s athletic, and she’s about to go into the ninth grade. Her core emotions—Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Liza Lapira), Anger (Lewis Black), and Fear (Tony Hale)—have reached equilibrium with each other since the events of the first Inside Out, with Joy serving as their fearless leader in regulating Riley’s mental and emotional state. Riley herself is becoming more secure in her identity, which the movie visualizes as a kind of glowing bonsai tree with its roots embedded in her deepest, most important memories. She’s happy. She thinks of herself as a good person.
Then puberty hits, and a host of new, more complicated emotions move into Headquarters, overturning Riley’s sense of self just as she sets out for a weekend at hockey camp. (Where 2022’s Turning Red dances around the physical changes that come with puberty using a red panda as a metaphor, Inside Out 2 focuses entirely on the mind, leaving questions about the body entirely out of the story.) Riley’s emotions are left scrambling to regulate her as she attempts to juggle her core beliefs along with new experiences and opportunities. The film takes place over a single weekend, but for Riley (and Joy and the others), the stakes might as well be for her entire identity. What she does on this weekend could very well shape the direction that the rest of her life will go.
Growing up is familiar territory for Pixar Studios. Recent movies like Luca, Coco, and Turning Red are about young people learning more about themselves as they reach the cusp of puberty and becoming more confident about their place in the world, even when the world turns out to be more complex than they might have expected it to be. Others—like Cars, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Up—tell stories of self-discovery regardless of the ages of their main characters. The Pixar formula is well established by now: introduce a slice of the world from an unexpected perspective, then gently challenge the main characters’ vision of their world until they learn something new about themselves, all while pushing the boundaries of what computer animation can do.
The formula feels twice-worn in this sequel; we’ve seen this world before, so anything new is more of an expansion on the world rather than an innovation. As with the first movie, Inside Out 2 is built around turns of phrase made literal, often to lightly humorous effect. Sarcasm is a literal chasm freshly opened inside Riley’s mindscape. A brainstorm is exactly what it sounds like. Riley’s newly discovered, anxious inner critic takes the form of an emotion monitoring her imagination through a massive screen in an homage to 1984’s Big Brother. Riley’s mental images of characters from other media are animated in different styles: flat matte colors for a beloved cartoon character from her childhood, lightly pixelated for someone from a video game. Both techniques feel slightly jarring next to the smooth sheen of characters with designs that bear a more recognizably Pixar design.
Overall, the animation quality is at its best in the little details, especially when Riley is playing hockey. The sheen of sweat on her face, the powder of ice building up under her skates as she plays, the way she chews nervously on the end of her mouthguard after a difficult play—all are beautiful, especially when the movie leaves them as unstudied moments, the little pieces of Riley’s world that make her existence feel believable and lived-in. The candy-colored world of the emotions living inside her head feels a little more forced. When the movie goes for grand spectacle, it’s harder to believe. It’s almost as though Pixar, by telling the story of a girl who is suddenly anxious about proving herself, has taken the arc of its own story to heart. Every strained metaphor and every stretched visual feels like the studio is struggling to tell the story about how they, too, have lost their sense of identity and are trying to reassert it.
★★☆☆
Inside Out 2 is in theaters everywhere now.