Pixar’s Latest gets in our Heads!
DIRECTOR: KELSEY MANN/2024
The last time we saw Riley, she had just overcome the biggest challenge of her life. After moving from Minnesota to San Francisco, her emotions Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust went into a tizzy as she struggled to make friends, fit in on the hockey team, and connect with her parents. Key personality traits like Goofball and Honesty Islands crumbled until she finally acknowledged her grief, making Sadness the unexpected hero. Since working through her emotional breakdown in 2015’s Inside Out, what could stop her?
Well, how about puberty? Almost a decade has passed for us, but Riley (Kensington Tallman) is just turning 13 in Inside Out 2. As she is finishing up middle school, Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Tony Hale, replacing Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), and Disgust (Liza Lapira, replacing Mindy Kaling) are in a groove as Riley prepares for hockey camp and high school. But everything changes overnight when their emotional control console is upgraded for puberty, introducing new buttons, new dials, and even new emotions. Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) are now running the show, and natural leader Joy isn’t so sure they’re up to the task. Are they really the best emotions for helping Riley navigate her struggles with identity and friendship?
Jim Tudor: I’m on record proclaiming Inside Out to be The Best Film of 2015. While I maintain that co-directors Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen’s original film is among Pixar’s best (high praise indeed), I almost immediately realized that I was wrong. Mad Max: Fury Road—a tremendously different film—couldn’t help but edge out everything else. Forgive me for taking this opportunity to finally set the record straight. I do, however, think that it’s apt to bring this up, as both Inside Out’s and Fury Road’s long-awaited follow-up films, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Inside Out 2, have opened within weeks of one another all these years later. Additionally, both of these follow-ups are quite satisfying and justify their existence in their respective franchises even as they don’t quite live up to the greatness of their immediate predecessors.
But on to the film at hand… There should be little debate that Inside Out 2 has it where it counts. (I’d say that it has lots of heart, but that sounds more apt for an Osmosis Jones sequel). Although the film is the feature debut of its director Kelsey Mann, it maintains an immediate warm familiarity with Inside Out. The movie flows like a logical next phase of development as are witness to the literal internal drama of Riley becoming a teenager. Yes, Inside Out 2 is more of the same, but when the same means a whole movie’s worth of top-notch cleverness and heartfelt, humorous takes on the human experience, there’s little to complain about.
But, I will anyway. My nits to pick with Inside Out 2 are minor, and more of a reflection on the broader state of mainstream family-friendly animated fare. The characters, in their overwrought energy, are by and large too large for the movie’s own good. Though Sadness emerged as dominant last time, this movie spins up with Joy back at the helm, with all the others bouncing off of her. Every line of dialogue is a declaration, a punchline-ready set-up even when that’s not the purpose of the line. Ever since Robin Williams famously uncorked in Aladdin, the subsequent deluge of celebrity character voices has only gotten louder. Every DreamWorks/Illumination/Disney animated outing has been like this for quite some time, and frankly, it’s disingenuous. Shouldn’t Pixar be above this sort of pandering to entertainment-saturated kids? Trust me Pixar, your new movie is wonderfully (and smartly) colorful enough to hold anyone’s attention.
Taylor Blake: I can’t say any of your nits picked at my experience, Jim, though your observations are accurate. Guessing celebrity voices has become a bit of a game for me in animated films, and I was shocked last summer when the credits for Elemental rolled and I realized almost no celebrity names graced the cast list. Every line feeling like a “declaration” seems appropriate for characters literalizing big emotions like Joy and Anxiety, who are using their celebrity voices to their max power. Poehler is resurrecting the contagious positivity of Leslie Knope, and Hawke is expanding on the bundle of nerves she’s been playing in the last two seasons of Stranger Things.
Inside Out 2 works because, like you said, it’s a logical next step for Riley’s growth, but also because of its precision in identifying the competing emotions of middle school. Inside Out juxtaposed Joy and Sadness, but Anxiety is in some ways an even crunchier foil. At first blush, Joy and Anxiety appear identical in their enthusiasm for self-actualization, and Hawke has the manic tendencies needed to match Poehler’s dominant energy. If Joy is an unrealistic pangloss, Anxiety is a surfeit of realism, neither of which will ultimately take Riley where she wants to go. Introducing their conflict as Riley is determining her belief system is, again, a logical step, but the magic of Pixar is how they dramatize life’s mundane moments into narratives with major emotional stakes. In this case, Riley’s idealizing of her childhood is collapsing in on top of her, revealing she is more complex than she realized. Understanding that “I am a good person” is not necessarily true is both a crushing discovery and a beautiful maturity. None of us are as terrible as our Anxiety would lead us to believe, and none of us are as flawless as in Joy’s roseate vision.
That’s a lovely subversion of the neat endings in most family entertainment, and like most every Pixar entry, it did make me cry. Yes, Inside Out 2 is wonderfully (and smartly) colorful, full of the top-tier puns, sight gags, and observational comedy you expect from the studio. Perhaps in the repeat viewing that I’m already planning I’ll find nits to pick, but they haven’t come to my mind yet.
Jim Tudor: All super well said, Taylor. I should reiterate that by the end of Inside Out 2, I was able to put my own anxieties about the state of mainstream animated features aside and joyfully go with the flow of the sharply appealing new clever takes on complex things like “the Belief System”. It’s easy for me, a lifelong animation nerd, to get all in my head about such things. Movies like this help us see the commonalty and universality of the human experience of growing up and navigating who we are, and do so with remarkable creative energy. Hopefully lots of people get out to the inside of a theater for this latest Pixar crowdpleaser.