Film Review: "Inside Out 2"

The newest Pixar film has its magical moments, but it's an unfortunate harbinger of the sequelitis that's about to hit the studio.

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It’s now been almost a decade since Pixar released Inside Out, a film which superbly explored the hold that emotions have over young and old alike. It’s the kind of film which works quite well as a standalone but, given its success and its enduring place in the popular memory, it was probably inevitable that it was going to get a follow-up, and so here we are. When the sequel begins, our beloved Riley is on the cusp of high school, and while this opens up many new opportunities for her, it also entails a lot of peril, particularly when several new emotions start horning in on Joy’s territory. In the intervening time our beloved Joy seems to have forgotten some of the valuable lessons she learned at the end of the first film and so, rather than giving Riley a chance to contend with some of her bad memories, she starts repressing them. The arrival of puberty and new emotions like Anxiety and Envy soon throw everything, including Riley’s life and future as a high school hockey player, into jeopardy. It’s thus up to Joy and emotions both old and new to find a productive sort of balance with one another.

The film hits all of the emotional beats that you’d expect, but I found myself wishing for just a bit more, something that packed the same emotional wallop as the moment in the first film when the beloved imaginary friend Bing Bong sacrifices himself so that Joy can make her way back to Headquarters. To be sure, there are some more somber moments–for example, when Joy comes perilously close to losing faith in her abilities, or when Riley becomes so overwrought with anxiety that she very nearly falls apart both physically and mentally–and these come closest to achieving the wrenching emotional honesty of the first movie.

For all of its limitations, Inside Out 2 is a very funny and at times even magical film and, as with the first go-round, much of this can be attributed to Amy Poehler, who continues to delight as Joy. She’s the kind of protagonist that you can’t help but love, with her effervescent personality and her absolute devotion to Riley and her well-being, both now and in the future. She does have her fair share of flaws, however, and she tends to let her desire to protect Riley get in the way of her charge’s emotional development and maturity. One would have thought that she would have learned a thing or two from her adventure with Sadness, but alas, her drive to make things okay in perpetuity and her inability to really grapple with anything remotely resembling negativity means that she often gets in her own way. Thanks to Poehler, however, while we sometimes grow exasperated with Joy, we never come to dislike her, and we actively want her to succeed. 

This isn’t to say that the other members of the voice cast aren’t likewise superb, because they are. Phyllis Smith is excellent as Sadness, as is Lewis Black as Anger, and the new cast shines, particularly Maya Hawke and Ayo Edebiri as Anxiety and Envy, respectively. Other than these two newcomers, however, the story doesn’t really give any of the rest of the emotions–including other additions such as Embarrassment and Ennui–the chance to flex their muscles or to grow and develop as characters. There are times when they can all seem to be little more than background to the central drama playing out between Joy and Anxiety (which, narratively, largely replays the conflict between Joy and Sadness from the first film).

Inside Out 2 does succeed, however, in its depiction of Anxiety and how this emotion can come to be particularly debilitating, how a relentless obsession with the future and the consequences of one’s actions can lead to all sorts of unfortunate consequences. As someone who is often riddled–and even paralyzed–by anxiety at times, the moment when Anxiety falls prey to her own frantic fears and gets sucked into a maelstrom was like a punch in the gut, particularly since we see the impact this has on Riley in the real world. Anyone who has ever had to feel like their mind and body were spinning out of their control will find this sequence someone hard to watch, even if its resolution does serve as a timely reminder that our anxieties don’t have to own us. 

Narratively, the film also works quite well, since its ultimately becomes a bit of a quest narrative, as Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear have to find and recover Riley’s Sense of Self in order to restore her confidence. As with the first film–and as so often in Pixar films, for that matter–neither the objective nor the conclusion are quite what one would expect. There’s an apt lesson, if not a particularly revelatory one, about the importance of allowing our sense of who we are as people to be shaped by our negative as well as our positive memories, a process which necessitates balance and moderation.

Did I loveInside Out 2? No, I don’t think I did. Yes, it’s charming and fun, and yes, the voice talent and animation are as strong as one would expect from an outing from one of the world’s premiere animation studios. Yet for all of its undeniable magic, I couldn’t help but think about Pixar’s recent announcement that they were going to be leaning more into established stories and relying more on sequels than on the deeply personal stories that characterized its major releases throughout the 2020s. Though Inside Out 2 does have its own soul and its own magic, I can’t help but wonder whether subsequent sequels will be able to pull off this trick. Something tells me that they won’t, and we’ll all be the poorer for it. However, given just how well it’s still doing at the box office–offering a much-needed reprieve to struggling theater chains and Hollywood in general–it seems inevitable that Joy and the gang will be back for more adventures, whether want (or need) them or not.