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Emotionally Charged

I’ve maintained the arguably bold declaration pretty consistently for nine years now that Inside Out is the best Pixar movie. It’s certainly the one that captures the platonic ideal of a Pixar movie to me, even if it may not be as iconic as Toy Story or as sophisticated as Ratatouille, and has probably inspired more than a few of the awful animated films of the last decade. But there’s a reason it’s had a pervasiveness no other Pixar film of the 2010s has enjoyed. Besides its sheer conceptual creativity, at its heart it so perfectly understands how to communicate the rich complexity of emotions to kids, and does so with that considered and beautiful Pixar pathos that is just as effective and moving for adults. A real gem of an animated film that gets to me every time.
But the double-edged sword of Inside Out being the rare original movie hit for Pixar in those late predominantly sequel-oriented John Lasseter years, unfortunately meant that it became a prime target for a cash-cow sequel itself. And so here we are with Inside Out 2, a movie that follows up on one of the ominous final gags of the prior movie: puberty -endeavouring to explore the complexities to the inner mind that come with moving through that period of life, and with a bunch of new marketable emotions to go along with it.
The vantage point that the film takes however is not so comprehensive, and as far as puberty is concerned it stays far away from the kind of subjects that Turning Red so intelligently evoked. Libido would probably make sense as a new emotion, especially given this film includes Ennui, but it doesn’t dare touch on reflecting any biological change, preferring to be firmly rooted in a values-based framework. It establishes some new facets to the mind of the now thirteen year-old Riley, such as a network of Belief synapses drawn from a pool of core memories that make up her ‘Sense of Self’, and a machine designed to repress Riley’s worst memories -in a sign of key emotion Joy (Amy Poehler) backtracking somewhat on the lesson learned in the first movie.
Like before, the story is centred on a singular event -Riley going to a hockey camp with her best friends where she is confronted with complex feelings around both her friends leaving for another school and her desire to integrate with the cool older players, one in particular whom she idolizes. Here, her new emotions are manifested: the paranoid and hyperactive Anxiety (a fantastic Maya Hawke), along with small unassuming Envy (Ayo Edebiri), large and quiet Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), and bored and ambivalent Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos). It’s not long before Anxiety determines that she is who Riley most needs to guide her through this situation, and so ejects the original five emotions out of the command centre and once more into the depths of Riley’s mind (as suppressed emotions the script is sure to spell out).
There are several areas in plot and theme where Inside Out 2 essentially treads the same ground as the first movie, and this is probably the most overt, as once again a bulk of the runtime is spent following emotions on a journey through Riley's mind to get back to the command centre so they can set right her mental state. The script obscures this a touch in a fairly unconvincing way by having a critical part of this journey focus on retrieving the macguffin that is Riley's Sense of Self -which Anxiety had banished to the back of the mind -but it's the same structure pursuing more or less the same end: stopping the negative emotions that are driving Riley while protecting what's seen to be a core part of her identity from being tarnished. And it's even more obvious in this case considering the aesthetics of Riley's mind have hardly changed much, even with the addition of new islands of personality. 
But while this is going on, the movie also spends a lot more time both in Riley's external world and in the Headquarters now dominated by Anxiety and these other explicitly conscientious-oriented emotions. And that’s very interesting to see. Where she had been so isolated in the first movie, here she is much more openly social and it is those social situations where the emotions in control of her mind are more relevant. Perception is everything, whether it’s by her friends, her coach, or these new peers who she wishes to emulate and be accepted by. The story is extremely simple -the kind you’d find in any family show where the kid tries so hard to impress others that they hurt their meaningful relationships and have to learn the lesson in that. But the dimension of the mind gives it an added freshness, especially in Anxiety’s misguided certainty that worrying about and “preparing” for every negative outcome will yield a positive result.
And there are these really compelling notes to the emotions as characters, specifically Anxiety and Joy -the former pushing out the latter, who herself experiences a subtle existential crisis, concerned that Riley growing up means needing less Joy in how she moves through life. And there’s something too in even Joy’s emotional barriers starting to break down. Once again, Joy is forced to confront her own singular government of Riley’s head, and that what she thinks may not actually be emotionally healthy for the girl. It’s a good moral, basic and repetitive though it may be. But crucially one thing this movie doesn’t repeat is the first film’s validation of a difficult emotion. While the first movie had no villain, Anxiety fills the role here, and there’s no sense of respecting Anxiety as a crucial part of emotional wholeness the way the earlier had with Sadness. Though I doubt many people would make the case for good anxiety, it’s a notable departure in theme that the film eventually endeavours to moderate to insincere result.
Still, some sympathy towards Anxiety is built. Her fears are honest, if not rooted in reality, and she doesn’t set out to undermine Riley’s mental health -but the poor values she instils predictably fail to manifest the caution intended and I like a lot the new horrible Sense of Self that is built out of this. I won’t spoil the exact ramification as it plays out in Riley’s own world (though you might be able to guess via context), but suffice to say it’s something Pixar has never illustrated before, at least not in a serious light, and in every choice of frame and detail, it’s quite powerfully done.
Distressing though this may be, the movie is obviously not without its lighter side, and though the part of it following Joy and co. traversing the mind feels banal, there are very fun and creative moments through it -starting with the memory vault that they are initially tossed into. Here they meet a preschool show character with a talking fanny-pack, who likes leaving breaks in his speech for audience responses, a hunky though functionally flawed video game character, and a mysterious Dark Secret, each of whom make for some pretty great visual jokes, and even some sharper satire than you usually get from Pixar. There’s some tight visual humour to the illustrations of various extreme anxiety scenarios that we see as well, and early in the movie one of the few puberty jokes that really lands is the new console that barely requires a touch by the emotions to provoke an extreme reaction in Riley. Certainly smarter than the obligatory return to checking in on other character’s heads -a bit that has lost any of its novelty and ingenuity.
Inside Out director and principal architect Pete Docter now runs Pixar, so this film was handed to a new creative team led by director Kelsey Mann. It’s not the only turnover. While Phyllis Smith and Lewis Black came back to their much acclaimed roles as Sadness and Anger, payment disputes left Bill Hader and Mindy Kaling replaced by Tony Hale and Liza Lapira as Fear and Disgust respectively. This difference is subtle, but the overall style of the film does reflect a changeover in artistic vision, in a way similar to how most other Pixar sequels have felt. However Inside Out 2 is a sight better than most of those sequels, even as it plays safe through repetitive narrative and thematic material. Most of its strength lies in Anxiety, and the compelling ways it characterizes that theme for young teenagers. In that spirit of communicating the nuances of emotions to kids, I think Inside Out 2 follows up the original aptly -for a slightly older, more emotionally confused demographic needing to know how to deal with the Anxiety often in control of their minds as well.

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