Inside Out 2
The tribulations of the teenage years add no end of complications to Pixar’s ambitious, knotty sequel.
Memories are made of this: Sadness and Joy
Courtesy of Disney/Pixar
The human brain is the most complex organism in the known universe. So who would want to be stuck in the mind of a 13-year-old girl? In Pixar’s ground-breaking, mind-blowing, multi-faceted Inside Out (2015), Riley was eleven and, when her parents upped sticks from Minnesota to San Francisco, she was coping with the upset of leaving behind everything she knew. To embody the vacillating sensations she was undergoing, Inside Out gave each of her five main emotions a face. Thus Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust were transformed into characters in their own right, pulling together to help Riley navigate the world around her.
That was then. Now Ridley is thirteen, is wearing braces and there’s a new stranger in town: Puberty. But before going full Turning Red, the sequel introduces a more complex teenage state of mind with a whole new crowd, comprising Anxiety (voiced by Maya Hawke), Envy, Nostalgia (June Squibb), Embarrassment and a very bored French figure called Ennui (nick-named Oui-Oui).
For a teenager, life hardly gets any simpler and when Riley is signed up for hockey camp, she finds a bunch of new emotions competing for centre stage. She wants to be loyal to her two besties, she wants to be seen as ‘cool’ to the new girls and she wants to be the best that she can be on the rink. But as her old emotions jostle to keep her on an even keel, her hormonal interlopers barge in to upset the status quo.
For the younger viewer, this might prove to be a convoluted playing field, and the film is in danger of being both cluttered and confusing, yet also an oversimplification of the teenage psyche. But this is Pixar we are talking about and Team IO manages to keep all the narrative balls in the air, while providing the requisite gags, laughs, visual ingenuity and even some excitement and suspense. As the competing elements veer towards a hormonal civil war, even Joy is on the verge of a nervous breakdown as the brash new emotions literally (and I mean literally) bottle the old ones up. Joy laments to her 13-year-old companions that it’s hard to remain constantly upbeat in the face of such odds: “Do you know how hard it is to stay positive all the time? When all you folks do is complain, complain, complain! Jiminy mother loving toaster strudel!” She has a point: Pixar have failed to furnish her with such collaborators as Optimism, Confidence, Pride, Love and Motivation.
The resultant escapade should remind parents of the minefield their teenage children are negotiating on an hourly basis, while giving adolescents a knowing chuckle. It’s a jungle in there. No doubt psychoanalysts will dismiss Inside Out 2 for being simplistic, but for a cartoon it is pretty out there, wildly imaginative and on the side of the angels. It’s certainly one title that on home entertainment will reward repeated viewings, while prompting thoughts of what Pixar will come up with next. An interior landscape of gender disorientation? A world in which endorphins, dopamine and serotonin are embodied as whacky happy cartoon characters? It could happen.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Voices of Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, Kensington Tallman, Liza Lapira, Tony Hale, Lewis Black, Phyllis Smith, Ayo Edebiri, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Paul Walter Hauser, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, Lilimar, Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green, Grace Lu, Yong Yea, Yvette Nicole Brown, James Austin Johnson, Steve Purcell, Frank Oz, June Squibb, Pete Docter, John Ratzenberger, Flea, Bobby Moynihan.
Dir Kelsey Mann, Pro Mark Nielsen, Screenplay Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein, Ph Adam Habib and Jonathan Pytko, Pro Des Jason Deamer, Ed Maurissa Horwitz, Music Andrea Datzman, Sound Ren Klyce.
Pixar Animation Studios-Walt Disney Studios.
96 mins. USA. 2024. UK and US Rel: 14 June 2024. Cert. U.
