(courtesy IMP Awards)
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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 has proven itself adept at marrying rich emotional exploration with entertaining characters and luminously evocative and colourful animation.
It has a lot of films now in its repertoire to back this up, but perhaps the one that really nails how rich its emotional storytelling can be – well, honestly, apart from all of them really (yeah, hard to pick favourites when they’re all this good) – is Inside Out, released in 2015 and featuring the voices of Amy Poehler, Mindy Kaling, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, and Phyllis Smith as Joy, Disgust, Fear, Anger and Sadness, emotions who all live inside the tween head of Riley (Kaitlyn Dias).
It did a beautifully affecting job of bringing a person’s inner emotions to hilarious but moving life, and while it could well have stood as its own non-sequeled creation for the rest of its much-loved cinematic life, the fact that there is a sequel is a wondrously good thing.
Because now we get to dive deep into that stew of contradictory, inconsistent and bewildering emotions known as teenagerhood, which of course means ushering in all-new emotions – anxiety (Maya Hawke) envy (Ayo Edebiri), ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) – and a whole host of new life challenges and obstacles to overcome … or not.
It looks gloriously good and given all the life stages yet to explore, means that we might be seeing Inside Out iterations for some time to come.
Inside Out 2 releases 13 June in Australia and 14 June U.S.