Courtesy of Disney/Pixar.

Inside Out 2

Rating ** Worth seeing

Directed by Kelsey Mann

Nine years on, it can be difficult to remember just how prominent Inside Out (2015) was at the time of its release. Seen from a certain light, it represents the belated last stand of Pixar as the dominant force in American animated films, five years after the three-year run of WALL-E (2008), Up (2009), and Toy Story 3 (2010) seemed to indicate that the studio’s critical and awards cachet was only on the upswing; famously, the former’s lack of a Best Picture Oscar nomination had a substantial effect on the expansion of the category, allowing the latter two films to be nominated in turn. After two tepidly received franchise films (Cars 2 and Monsters University) and the moderately liked Brave, Inside Out seemed to general film culture like a renewed promise of original, whip-smart and emotionally resonant kids’ movies that could be equally enjoyed by adults. To take just two examples: it landed at #9 on the Film Comment end-of-year poll, a top-ten animated film placing only otherwise accomplished by WALL-E—and never achieved by the other best-known animation stalwart, Studio Ghibli—and received a coveted five-star rating from the short-lived, beloved website The Dissolve, a feat shared with just Her and Mad Max: Fury Road. Since Inside Out, however, Pixar has never even come close to the same level of critical respect, whether by dint of over-reliance on franchises, formulas, or weak concepts.

Thus, Inside Out 2 can be construed along two largely similar yet crucially different lines: as yet another instance of Pixar grasping at straws, trying to establish/revive a franchise that will attract people with their nostalgia for a beloved film and a better time for the company; and as an attempt to recapture the magic, to reengage with one of their cleverest and most complex ideas for a film. Much of the love for the original Inside Out came from the constant elaboration on its primary setting within the mind of a young girl named Riley, controlled by five emotions—Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale, replacing Bill Hader due to pay disputes), and Disgust (Liza Lapira, replacing Mindy Kaling for the same reason)—and maintained by a host of blob-like workers. Many literalizations of abstract mental concepts abounded: memories as individual orbs, ideas as little lightbulbs, personality and interests as floating islands, an actual train of thought. While veteran Pixar director Pete Docter and the studio’s creative team at large moved through these concepts with a surprising amount of ease, the original film nevertheless suggested a mise-en-abyme: since the narrative could not function without each emotion operating “out-of-character” at times, it would seem that each emotion themself has little emotions controlling their own brains, a never-ending spiral that stands in contrast to the relative simplicity of both the interactions between emotions and between humans. This, perhaps, is the best aspect of Inside Out: unlike other Pixar films about more-or-less actual people like say, the wildly overpraised Turning Red, the stakes for Riley are modest, reflective of the little struggles that can feel overwhelming to a young girl when faced with a cross-country move and the (in this case literal) loss of the capacity to feel joy. With the concept allowed by Inside Out, Pixar can have its cake and eat it too, offering all of the typical spectacle and adventure internally while dealing with heartfelt drama externally.

Given all of this, and considering that Inside Out ended with a just-in-case sequel hook with Riley about to turn 13, it might be a surprise that it took this long for Pixar to give this concept another go. But for better and worse, Inside Out 2—helmed by first-time director Kelsey Mann—reveals the strengths and limitations of returning to the same well twice, even one as potentially fruitful as this. Like the first film, it takes place over a compressed period of time, as Riley begins to undergo puberty right before she embarks on a three-day hockey camp. Learning that her two best friends, Bree and Grace, will be going to a different high school, Riley has to navigate the possibility that this hockey camp will allow her to join the elite high school team while also maintaining her preexisting friendships, and the circumstances generate four new emotions: Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos, inexplicably but wonderfully), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser, in a very funny almost totally non-verbal performance), who literally bottle up and suppress the original five emotions.

The essential narrative formula of the first film is brought thus back once more: Joy and her compatriot(s) are cast out of the brain headquarters and have to return in time to stop Riley from making drastic and poor decisions, in the process bringing back a crucial MacGuffin expelled from the center of Riley’s mind. That item here is, tellingly, an entirely new aspect of the mind: the Sense of Self, built out of many Belief System strands deep in the subconscious borne from specific memories; the visualization of this looks eerily similar to the Spirit Trees from fellow Disney release Avatar. While Riley does interact with other people, including her friends, her would-be no-nonsense coach Roberts, and star high school hockey player Val, most of her time seen on-screen is solitary, a set of individual actions and decisions that seems more coherent when prompted by entirely internal stimuli.

One of Inside Out‘s cleverer ideas lay in Joy’s inherent need for control, especially when pitted against the destabilizing presence of Sadness, and the climax involved her own (again, contradictory) capacity for growth; the balance between the two created the rare Pixar film without an identifiable antagonist, a reveal which often cheapens their lesser work. It may be too much to call Anxiety and her crew villains, but Inside Out 2 is terribly hamstrung by the clear characterization of all of her actions as negative in some way: the Sense of Self generated by the anxiety-coded memories is a twisted and jagged tree in contrast to the harmonious Sense of Self summed up in the phrase “I am a good person,” and the measures taken to stop any interference go well past even Joy’s worst decisions in either film. The result makes for a much more single-minded viewing experience, lacking the relative complexity within the parallel individual journeys of Joy and Riley.

(It is, however, tempting and fascinating to see Anxiety’s casting as a sneaky bit of commentary on the character: Hawke is of course the daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, entering prominence at a cresting point in the overblown conversation about “nepo babies.” An excellent actor, she has also handled that line of questioning about as well as anyone, but the desire to fit in yet excel at all costs seems largely congruent with a person nigh-imprisoned by her privilege.)

Inside Out 2 also keeps in line with its predecessor’s opportunity to use the journey as a means of exploration, both of new concepts—a literal stream of consciousness, hidden secrets manifested in the form of atypically animated cartoon and video game characters, represented by a Dora the Explorer-esque fourth-wall breaking dog and pouch and a Final Fantasy-esque swordsman, respectively—and of old mental locales, all in states of disrepair and transformation due to puberty. Here, even more in the first film, the mental mechanics of labor feel even stranger and more dubious: the mental disarray of puberty is caused in part by workers breaking the command console (causing each emotion’s action to be felt that much more acutely by Riley) and going on a quick lunch break. The height of this takes place in Imagination Land, whose structures have been repurposed by Anxiety to force Riley to stay awake thinking of everything that could go wrong on the final day of hockey camp; these images are generated by a host of artists hunched over at their drawing desks and monitored by faux film cameras. The original emotions eventually break this up, indirectly invoking the speech from Network and culminating with an homage to the “1984” Macintosh ad (of course Pixar was mostly supported by Steve Jobs for a long time). The conception of this whole scene, which stalls the momentum of the film, feels odd, especially considering poor working conditions across animation as a whole; to more-or-less copy a real-world studio problem and resolve it without incident feels at least a little bit tone deaf.

Despite these flaws and the general familiarity of the scenario, Inside Out 2 is ultimately successful, in large part because, like in the first film, the embrace of a harmony and balance among the emotions is emphasized above all else. There’s something at least a little bit admirable in a film that’s willing to take the phrase “I got my joy back” literally, that recognizes that actions mean little without the emotions that brought a person to do them in the first place. Despite so many contradictions—for instance, the lack of these new emotions within any other person, only partially resolved by the end of the film—the central core of the Inside Out 2 films remains intact: a fundamental optimism tempered by age and experience, even if there’s a simplicity to its complexity.