Inside Out 2
To be fair, "Inside Out" is a perfect franchise to discuss emotions, seeing as how the central concept is about anthropomorphized versions of emotions living in a control center in our heads. And if you wanted to use a Pixar movie to speak to young adults about our current and very topical age of anxiety, "Inside Out 2" practically writes itself. And maybe this is why I didn't really respond emotionally to what is honestly a very well-executed movie: it all just felt so easy and safe. Everything is wrapped up neatly in a bow, with main lessons driven into us with no subtlety; not that subtlety is needed in a movie primarily aimed at younger audiences, but the lack of it contributes to an overall feeling of been-there, done-that.
Riley, the girl with our lovable emotions in her head from the first movie, is now 13 years old and about to enter high school. She is invited to a hockey camp with her best friends Bree and Grace, but soon discovers her friends will be going to a different high school soon after camp is over. Riley wants to have one last epic hang with her besties, but also is determined to qualify for her new school’s team, the Firehawks, and become friends with the older students already on the team. The night before camp, a "Puberty Alarm" goes off, and Riley's brain control center is suddenly home to some new emotions -- Envy, Embarrassment, Ennui and Anxiety.
This sets up a scenario where Joy (voiced again by Amy Poehler) must try and control the chaos caused by a new slew of "negative" emotions while eventually leading everyone to the discovery that even something like anxiety is normal, healthy, and vital to our long-term happiness. It's a very similar approach to the first movie; this is just the "Inside Out: Slightly Older" edition. Anxiety (voiced by Maya Hawke), as you'd expect, is given center stage, with the other new emotions mostly mined for comedy bits. The Anxiety character is a very clever design, appearing to be friendly and acting in Riley's best interests, never really portrayed as bad or evil. Again, the lesson is that all emotions are needed, as long as there's balance. Things start to get out of hand when Anxiety takes over the control center, corrupting Riley's "Sense of Self" by banishing the original emotions (particularly Joy). The eventual reunification of all the emotions is a given, and the lessons learned can be seen from a mile away. Again, this isn't a bad thing necessarily, it just doesn't feel like something from Pixar's prime era of imagination and creativity.
We are also given very few standout moments visually, as we are often confined to the brain control center, where we spent a lot of time in the original. There are some decent moments as Joy and her crew discover new areas of the brain on their journey back to the control center, but there's nothing that really makes you go "wow!", which is unusual for Pixar. Obviously things look great generally, and the character designs are wonderful, but there are obvious limitations to creativity given the mostly familiar settings. Those times when the original emotions discover new areas of the brain are often very funny, particularly a delightful sequence where they are stuck in a vault of locked away memories. Their encounter with Bloofy, an old, 2D cartoon from Riley's distant youth, and Lance Slashblade, a particularly useless anime character, is a lot of fun, and an opportunity to experiment with different animation styles (even if it's similar to the Spider-Verse approach).
The story also hinges on how much you care about Riley's story, which isn't particularly complicated. I would argue the movie wants you to connect with the emotions rather than Riley herself, which is a little confusing. Take the climactic scene when things finally boil over and Riley starts to genuinely panic. She is shown hunched over and crying, but Anxiety is shown in a terrifying, glitchy matrix of blurred color, literally frozen in fear. It's an effective and scary sequence, but the thing that saves the day is Joy, and we feel relief for the character of Anxiety; Riley is almost secondary to the sequence. This isn't anything new either; how could we forget Bing Bong from the original? But it would've been nice to connect more with Riley, instead of the colorful animated blobs representing emotions inside of her head. It would've been more interesting (and a bigger risk) to have Riley not have to revert to be such "a good person," but instead she is kind of a blank template of a teenager.
It's no easy feat to make a sequel that tops the original, especially when the original was such a daring and surprising piece of work. That lack of spark is particularly evident in "Inside Out 2," marring what is otherwise an intelligent and lovingly-created story. You get the feeling that the writers wanted to make a story about anxiety because it's very of-the-moment, and in their effort to make the pieces fit within the "Inside Out" framework, they lost a little something that makes the best Pixar movies so special.
