Inside Out 2: Pixar's Lovely Look at the Emotional Rollercoaster that Is Puberty
By Karen Gordon
Rating: A
Like sequels of beloved movies, puberty can either be terrific, passable or really suck. So, while Riley, the lead character in Pixar’s Inside Out, has a rough-ish start to adolescence, the sequel Inside Out 2 — I’m relieved to say — is terrific.
Inside Out, which won the Oscar for best animated feature in 2016, was a little miracle of a movie. It inventively turned basic emotions into characters as it looked at the psychological impact of a cross-country move on a little girl named Riley.
As Riley tried to cope with being far away from everything familiar, she started to crumble, while those inner emotions worked hard to bring her back to balance, sometimes touring through her inner psychological landscape.
The movie — at once loopy but very sweet — managed to be an all-ages comedy, a sweet story for kids with a deeper layer that spoke to adults. As with the original, the sequel takes place in two realms: the exterior world and the one inside Riley’s psyche where her emotions work.
We met those emotions in the first film. There’s Joy (Amy Poehler), the de facto leader, plus Sadness (Phillys Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Disgust (Liza Lapira here replacing Mindy Kaling) and, of course, Anger (Lewis Black).
The emotions hang out in what looks like a mission control room, carefully overseen by Joy, with a control board of dials and knobs used to give Riley just enough of something. Things have been going well, and they're very happy with Riley’s inner landscape, which is well-managed and built on Riley’s feeling happy and loved.
In the real world, Riley (Kensington Tallman) is now 12. She’s an only child and doted on by two very loving parents (Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan). She loves playing hockey with her best friends Grace (Grace Lu) and Bree (Sumayyah Nuridden-Green).
The three are over the moon when Coach Roberts (Yvette Nicole Brown) invites them to a stay over at hockey camp during the summer break. Riley is especially excited because Valentina (Lilimar), her role model and the best hockey player in high school, is going to be there.
In the car enroute, Riley learns some sad news. Next year she won’t be going to the same school as her two besties. So, they determine that this camp will be a good way to mark their last time together as a team. Yay? Not so fast.
The morning of the day they head to camp, the normally sweet-tempered Riley wakes up in a funk, with a few pimples on her face and her emotions bouncing all over the place. Joy and the mission control crew are thrown for a loop trying to figure out how to manage this. No matter what they do or which button they press, Riley reacts at peak emotional volume. That's when they notice a new button on their control panel marked “puberty.”
It gets worse! A construction crew bashes in and rips out the old control panel, installing a new, higher-tech one. With that, a new group of emotions moves in. Meet Fear (Tony Hale), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopolis), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), plus the leader of the new gang, the charming, but, well, worried, Anxiety (Maya Hawke).
Riley arrives at hockey camp and runs straight into Valentina. The two click. She invites Riley to hang out with her and her friends, and to be on their hockey team during their time at camp.
Riley now faces her first serious dilemma. On one hand, it’s a dream come true. But doing that means abandoning her two friends, and their plans to make this time together special before they go to separate schools.
This is all kinds of new emotional territory for Riley. Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger know Riley well, and try to help based on what they know. But the new emotions — Anxiety in particular, who has her eye on Riley’s future — disagrees. In the kerfuffle, the new emotions stage a coup, physically banishing the old gang by turfing them out to the farthest reaches of Riley’s inner psyche.
While Joy and her team try to find the way back to the control room, Anxiety — now working the updated control panel — takes the lead, aiming to manage Riley’s emotions based on what she feels are moves that will set Riley up for success in the future.
As in the first film, the physical layout of Riley’s inner landscape is a multi-level complex that has dead ends, twists and turns. There’s an inner a workshop where desk dividers make up a house of cards that are employed to feed ideas to Anxiety, who wants to motivate Riley by showing her some worst-case scenarios.
All of this is a challenge to the basic emotions, even to Joy, whose plucky can-do attitude is tested. But it is up to her to lead the basic emotions back to the control room where Anxiety is running the show. Meanwhile, Riley out in the real world faces dilemmas she can’t navigate without stressing out.
When you’re talking emotional rollercoasters, focusing a movie about emotions during puberty is a great idea. Everything is changing, and our sense of self is up in the air. Riley is making choices but feels unmoored.
As in Inside Out, Riley isn’t the only one processing what’s going on. The emotions embody their nature — Joy will always be upbeat; Sadness always be down — but are not incapable of growing and seeing the value in each other. In the first film, Joy figured out that there was a value in letting sadness creep into happy thoughts.
In Inside Out 2, the emotions must wrangle with the difference between their hopes for Riley, their idealistic vision for her, and what they want to protect her from versus who Riley chooses to be.
Riley is on a journey to figuring out who she is as she starts to leave the simplicity of childhood behind and begins to feel the contradictory pulls in her life. It’s messy, painful, and embarrassing at times, but also wonderful. You might want to bring a few tissues.
Inside Out 2. Directed by Kelsey Mann. Written by Meg LeFauve, Dave Holstein, and Kelsey Mann. Starring Kensington Tallman, Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Tony Hale, Bill Hader, Ayo Edebiri, Yvette Nicole Brown, Limimar, and Adèle Exarchopolis. In theatres June 14.