I haven’t been to the movies in over a week because, well…I had no desire to see another Bad Boys movie mostly. But another Inside Out? That may be a different story. True, Pixar isn’t what it used to be, but I somewhat suspect the reason the studio took this long to make another Inside Out was to make sure they got it right. The first movie is a masterpiece as an examination on how emotions work in the psyche of a young girl who isn’t happy about moving to a new city, where Joy (played brilliantly by Amy Poehler) has to learn that Sadness (the equally brilliant Phyllis Smith) has a place and that it’s wrong to bottle up an emotion just because it might be negative. Life’s more complicated than that.
Well, in the sequel, Riley hits puberty and suddenly has some new emotions to deal with. Was it on the same level as the first one?
Riley (Kensington Tallman) is now 13, and she’s adjusted well to middle school life in San Francisco. Her hockey playing has netted her and her two best friends an invite to a weekend at a hockey camp led by the local high school coach. Her emotions are all onboard and running things smoothly. Joy (Poehler) is running things while Sadness (Smith) is there to basically remind Joy of when she screwed up in the past. Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (new actor Tony Hale), and Disgust (new actor Liza Lapira) are also fine, but then the night before Riley is set to leave, workmen come in to install the new puberty controls for headquarters, and it isn’t long before new emotions show up, starting with Anxiety (Maya Hawke), and followed soon after with Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser).
Anxiety, however, is concerned with the future. Riley’s friends will be attending a different high school, and Riley is worried she won’t make the hockey team. To ensure Riley has friends and a life, Anxiety uproots Riley’s sense of self and banishes the original five emotions to another part of Riley’s mind. Joy knows she needs to get Riley’s core back to headquarters, but it won’t be easy. She can send Sadness on ahead, but she’ll need the other three to go with her. Meanwhile, Anxiety and the others are making Riley act in self-destructive ways, so Joy may need to act fast. After all, it’s only Riley’s future that may be at stake in this movie’s rather small stakes sort of way.
Bottom line: this movie is good, probably one of the better Pixar movies to come out in quite some time, but it’s not on par with the first one. My thinking on these movies is they’re more clever than funny, and I do like that, but this one doesn’t hit as hard as the first movie. It probably can’t. I chalk part of that up to the fact the original movie’s director and co-writer Pete Docter was promoted to a more executive position within the company and isn’t dealing as much with the creative end of things. Still, this sequel does largely work, and it is a very charming movie in its own right.
A good deal of that comes from the fact that, really, the stakes here aren’t end-of-the-world sort of things, and Anxiety and the other new emotions aren’t malicious. If anything, Anxiety may be making the same mistake Joy made in the first movie and assuming that the way to make Riley’s life run right, it means certain emotions just shouldn’t be involved in things in headquarters. Anxiety and Joy both, in their own way, want what’s best for Riley. Anxiety just doesn’t know how to do that with the others just yet. It’s another part of growing up, and like the first movie, there’s a poignancy to the movie, one that can be moving and sweet. It may not be the first movie, but Inside Out 2 is still a good movie in its own right.
Grade: B+
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