(courtesy IMP Awards)
SNAPSHOT
The little voices inside Riley’s head know her inside and out—but next summer, everything changes. Pixar’s Inside Out 2 returns to the mind of newly minted teenager Riley as headquarters is undergoing a sudden demolition to make room for something entirely unexpected: new Emotions! Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, who’ve long been running a successful operation by all accounts, aren’t sure how to feel when Anxiety shows up. And it looks like she’s not alone. Pixar’s Inside Out 2 is directed by animation filmmaker Kelsey Mann, a storyboard artist making her feature directorial debut after working on the Party Central short and the Monsters at Work series. The screenplay is written by Meg LeFauve. Based on the original Inside Out (2015) by Pete Docter, Ronnie Del Carmen, Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley. It’s produced by Mark Nielsen. (courtesy First Showing)
Pixar, by and large, makes movies that really cut to the heart while delighting you with animation and characters so richly buoyant that you don’t soon forget the impact the impact they have on you.
After a few decades in the animation game, there are a lot of their films to be delighted by but some, for this blogger at least, stick out more distinctly than others such as Inside Out (2015) which took us into the mind of a little girl grappling with life and some of the disruptive changes it can bring.
It was so relatable and full of emotions that really resonated that the idea of a sequel might seem entirely unnecessary … until, of course, you see the new teaser trailer and realise that it’s highly likely that animated lightning is quite likely about to strike twice, and now with even more emotions filling the screen, including one in particular that many of us will be uncomfortably familiar with.
‘Anxiety, voiced by Maya Hawke, might be new to the crew, but she’s not really the type to take a back seat,’ said Mann. ‘That makes a lot of sense if you think about it in terms of what goes on inside all our minds.’ (First Showing)
Yep our minds are full of all kinds of emotional chaos and I suspect that while we might consign anxiety to the bad basket, the reality is, as with pretty everything human, quite a bit more complicated.
Inside Out 2 releases 13 June 2024 in Australia and 14 June in U.S.