(courtesy IMP awards)
Regardless of what else it might be, and the sequel to 2015’s Inside Out is a great many brilliantly well-done and, it must be said, not as finely executed things, Inside Out 2 feels like a great big hug from some much-loved, incredibly emotional friends.
That was pretty much inevitable because much like the Toy Story franchise which kicked off the animated wonder and miracle of deftly combined deep thoughts and big feelings that is Pixar, coming back to the characters of Inside Out is like picking up an adventure nine years on and it all feeling like you never really left.
Which in the case of sequels can be a good and a bad thing.
In the case of Inside Out 2, it is for the greater part, a quite good and wonderful thing with our reunion with irrepressibly pushy Joy (Amy Poehler), despair-prone Sadness (Phyllis Smith), skittery Fear (Tony Hale), easily prone Anger (Lewis Black) and scornful Disgust (Liza Lapira) feel just like any longed-for reunion should – like a coming together of all the memories and nostalgia of the old (and rather wonderfully, Nostalgia is briefly in the film, voiced hilariously and perfectly by June Squibb) with the realities of a new and altogether different age.
And in the case of the franchise’s protagonist, for that is mostly surely what Inside Out 2 is part of, Riley (Kensington Tallman) it is indeed a completely different age with our plucky young girl now a thirteen-year-old who is grappling with the bewildering changes that come roaring along when puberty arrives.
This being an all-ages slice of Disney animation, Inside Out 2 doesn’t delve at all into the more emotionally messy and hormonally-charged elements of this inevitable transition, but what it does do is introduce us to the new emotions that come with it with star player, Anxiety (Maya Hawke who’s the MVP of the new crew), Envy (Ayo Eedbiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos).
They arrive overnight as Riley sleeps, with Joy and the others shocked and bewildered when wrecking crews arrive and completely change and rearrange everything about their beloved HQ.
Suddenly the console is orange and all these new and pushy emotions – well Anxiety is, driven by a characteristic unease that they are NOT ready for all the life changes that lie ahead – are crowding around them and what in all the cerebral upheaval is happening here exactly?
That’s the million dollar question, and while we know what’s going on, Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust do not, and nor of course does Riley who goes to bed as a happy kid excited to go to hockey camp with her friends Grace and Bree (Grace Lu and Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green respectively) and wakes up as a chaotic ball of emotional contrariness who, with Anxiety bumping Joy clean out of the way, causes havoc as she tries to adjust to a whole new world (impending high school) and impelling emotional and mental drivers which, as we all know from our teenage years, take a good long while to settle down and make sense.
Like a decade maybe, which is hilariously remarked upon by the sage emotions in the heads of both of Riley’s parents (voiced by Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan) as the time it will take for Riley to land somewhere in the realm of somewhat settled adulthood (let’s be honest we never really do which is why Inside Out has ongoing franchise stamped all over it; it could be the 7 Up of Pixar franchises).
As Riley tries to navigate her way through emotions which don’t see hockey camp, where she might get picked for the star high school team, led by Valentina “Val” Ortiz (Lilimar), Inside Out 2 takes us on a wild ride where Anxiety takes control without bothering to check with the previous emotions in charge – she’s like a new corporate manager who doesn’t check with incumbents before wholly changing things and causes unmitigated hellish chaos as a result – and Joy and the others have to journey right to the dark environs of the back of Riley’s mind to retrieve the essence of who she really is and avert potential, actually current, disaster.
If at this point, you’re thinking the plot of Inside Out 2 sounds a lot like that of Inside Out, you’d be partly right; there’s the chase through the mind to right a wrong, an upending of the established order and some wild and crazy moments where it looks like the grand adventure to right Riley may not pay off.
While that might feel like lazy sequel writing, and truth be told, at times it is without nowhere near the imaginative pizzazz or thrilling verve of the first film, it serves a nice narrative drive purpose of setting up some neat tension between the new and old regimes, and establishing that while change is inevitable, that doesn’t mean that everything before it must go too.
In fact, one of Inside Out 2‘s greatest gifts, besides Anxiety who veers between monstrous controller and contrite learner, is how deftly and insightfully it explores what it means to transition into an entirely new phase of life, particularly one as messy and unpredictable as puberty and how it can be hard to know what to discard and what to keep in a whole new unknown phase of life.
Like its predecessor and many of Pixar’s other finely wrought and beautifully executed films, Inside Out 2 is a gorgeously appealing mix of goofy hilarity (thank you Pouchy, voiced by James Austin Johnson, a character favourite childhood TV show), emotional insightfulness and rich humanity that goes imaginatively big and silly when it needs to and really emotionally deep when it needs to, finishing with a deep dive into the nature of anxiety and its resolution which feels like a truly affecting piece of animated therapy.
Inside Out 2 is one of those near-perfect sequels that, while it may not summit the success and moving effectiveness of the film that came before it, comes very, very close, offering us a reunion with old friends but also expanding the world of Riley to include new emotions, new internals “lands” and a sense that while life comes with a huge number of challenges, especially during the hellish messiness of the teenage years, that it’s all survivable with friends and family around you and an intrinsic appreciation of who you are that, if you can hold onto it, may make navigating all that change not as bad as it might initially seem.
Check out this fun featurette …
And an interview …