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.

Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films.

Evil Does Not Exist/悪は存在しない/Aku wa Sonzai Shinai

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Hamaguchi Ryusuke

Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s films have never lacked a prevailing sense of mystery. Since his festival breakthrough Happy Hour (2015), his scripts have accurately been characterized as teeming with layered characterizations and rich dialogue, following a strict adherence to a realist depiction of the world: even the potentially outré element in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy‘s (2021) third segment, involving a worldwide computer virus, has the effect of further downplaying any overtly “unrealistic” element. But within those putative restrictions, the expansive nature of his scenarios lead into uncharted territory. This comes across most obviously in the great ruptures and leaps of logic: the wondrous epilogue to Drive My Car (2021), which Hamaguchi included out of a desire to not simply rest on a “perfect” ending; the central disappearance in Happy Hour, permanently altering the relationship dynamics of a previously stable quartet; the sly echoes between Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy‘s stories.

Evil Does Not Exist concludes with one such disruption, perhaps Hamaguchi’s most daring gambit yet, but from its opening moments it leans with supreme confidence into this ambiguous atmosphere. The first sequence—a continuous tracking shot trained upwards through a mountain forest in winter, interrupted by several cast and crew credit intertitles—initially presents a readily ascertainable filmmaking process before the experience of “simple” observation—guided by Ishibashi Eiko’s elegiac score—gradually turns the viewer’s mind towards all manner of possibilities of perspective and motion orientation. As I watched, the movement even seemed to suggest tree branches animated to slide up the screen, an alluring, intrusive unreality that spoke to the uncanniness of the normal. That the matter-of-fact following shot—a close-up frame between trees that a young girl steps into, eyes cast to the sky—feels at odds with the smooth, majestic-turned-disquieting procession of natural images beforehand only deepens the unsettling feeling.

Of course, part of Evil Does Not Exist‘s allure lies in the complete U-turn it would appear to present from Hamaguchi’s wholly unanticipated worldwide success with Drive My Car, still one of the most unanticipated (and deserving) instances of universal acclaim in recent memory. A 106-minute film that emerged out of a collaboration with Ishibashi—intended initially to serve as raw material for a medium-length visual accompaniment to a live performance—and starring crew member Omika Hitoshi as taciturn village handyman Takumi, it in many ways is the antithesis of the sprawling, dialogue-heavy, strictly professional nature of its predecessor.

But Hamaguchi, as much as any living filmmaker, is never content to simplify his proceedings, to—contrary to Drive My Car‘s signature image—simply follow a road down to its conclusion, both in the arc of his body of work thus far and within his individual films. It takes a full fifteen minutes before the “central” problem of Evil Does Not Exist—a planned glamping site running into the concerns of the neighboring village—introduces itself, in an offhand comment only truly elaborated upon another ten minutes later. Within that stretch of time, Hamaguchi casts his watchful eye on the details of nature, simultaneously taking in the forest, the trees, and the people that move through them.

It’s certainly telling that Hamaguchi’s signature “point-of-view” shots, wherein characters unexpectedly stare into the lens in close-up, are here typically construed as being from the vantage point of specific natural details, including a deer carcass and a patch of wild wasabi. As with the humanity that has taken up so much of his cinema, nature is not merely seen as an amorphous, all-expansive whole but instead an agglomeration of discrete beings, each with their own particular utility: wood to be used for Takumi’s own fireplace, spring water to provide for a specialty udon restaurant, stray bird feathers for a village elder’s harpsichord. In the moments before the “narrative” truly takes hold—made most clear in an unexpected dream on the part of Takumi’s daughter, which flashes back to images from her walk home with her father in a chronological disruption exactly when the film’s flow had seemed to be fully established—these inhabitants’ harmony with the world they walked through felt completely settled.

Evil Does Not Exist has already been lauded for its fifteen-minute meeting scene, an exemplary series of quiet but firm rebukes to two company representatives doubly out of their element: in an area of Japan they are completely unfamiliar with (despite the village being a few hours’ drive from Tokyo) and in their actual status as talent agency workers, contracted by the glamping company to pitch this far afield project. In Hamaguchi’s typically egalitarian approach, the establishment of the key village speakers creates an anticipation and investment in the specific concern each person will voice, in the particular manner they will couch an unmistakeable anger with the calamity that may soon be visited upon the place where they live. It is made clear that this is not merely a case of self-preservation: Takumi notes that the region was only settled after World War II, and that everyone in the village is an outsider. But within these parameters, the delicate balance already in place must be preserved.

But here, Hamaguchi chooses to reveal the delicate balance of his own film to be far different than might be expected. Evil Does Not Exist pivots to focus upon Takahashi (Kosaka Ryuji) and Mayuzumi (Shibutani Ayaka), the two company representatives, first as they express their misgivings in a Google Meets call in Tokyo and then as they travel back to the village, hoping to ask Takumi to personally aid with taking care of the glamping site. During their drive back, the conversation creates a genuine back-and-forth for the first time in the film, a constant volley of conversation as Takahashi and Mayuzumi discuss their work experiences and future plans, with the latter even making fun of the former when she spots a dating app notification on his phone. The change in tone is refreshing, but not as a respite per se: the scene on the whole continues with the same evenhandedness of execution as prior dialogue scenes. Instead, it feels like a further broadening of horizons, something that opens the possibilities of what this particular film can achieve.

It is here, then, where the ending fully comes into play. Without saying anything specific, it is best understood as a continuous movement, the primacy of nature so fully embodied in the opening sequences reasserting itself upon this new understanding of each of these characters. It begins with a truly stunning shot of Mayuzumi at Takumi’s cabin, watching the fog roll in as a broadcast plays on the community intercom, with the natural forces obscuring what had on the road seemed to be a crystalline image. The ultimate occurrences are desperately sad, but, per the title, they cannot be simply distilled down to a judgment according to human values. Like with Ishibashi’s varied score, part mournful strings and part muted electronics, Hamaguchi constantly searches for a new means of conveying an essential mystery of human behavior; here, he has found yet another realm to ponder.