Inside Out 2 Adds Emotions but Loses Emotion

Evan D.

Pete Docter’s 2015 masterpiece, Inside Out, presented the inner workings of the mind as an office and anthropomorphized the emotions that drive us as employees. It had the sort of universal appeal that Pixar wants to return to, but not for the reasons that they think. Misidentifying the reason for the blockbuster success of Docter’s film has lead Pixar and first time director Kelsey Mann to craft Inside Out 2 with more emotions but significantly less emotionality.

Again we are dropped into the head of Riley Anderson(Kensington Tallman), now 13 years old and settled into her life in San Francisco. Riley is a star of her youth hockey team and plays in perfect harmony with her best friends Grace (Grace Lu) and Bree (Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green). Things have settled down inside Riley’s head as well. Joy (Amy Poehler) has learned to lean on her coworkers in headquarters to guide Riley smoothly into adolescence. The emotions in Riley’s head have begun to selectively cultivate memories, sending bad ones to the back of the mind and forming the good ones into roots of an ethereal tree representing the young girl’s sense of self. Confident in herself as a good person — and essentially nothing more — Riley and her friends earn a tryout for the High School hockey team in the form of a three day training camp. The team up in Headquarters has done their job, until puberty hits and a slate of new emotions descends, chief among them Anxiety. (Maya Hawke)

Desperate to make a good impression on the coach (Yvette Nicole Brown) and captain (Lilimar) of the team, Riley allows Anxiety, Envy (Aho Edebiri), Ennui (Adele Exarchopoulos), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and the innocent Nostalgia (shout out to June Squibb)to run the show. Anxiety punts Riley’s sense of self to the back of her mind, replacing it with doubts and worries. Meanwhile the old emotions that ran things up until now are banished to a vault containing all of Riley’s deepest secrets. In a journey reminiscent of Inside Out, Joy et. al. are forced to traverse the corners of Riley’s brain to restore her sense of self before Anxiety can completely replace it with self doubt.

If Inside Out 2 sounds similar to its predecessor, it is in many facial ways. Joy is separated from the control panel in Riley’s head and has to find a way back before the other emotions make a decision that could irreparably harm her. The road back to Headquarters is littered with little puns and visualizations of processes of the mind. Rather than riding the Train of Thought he old emotions have to drift down the Stream of Consciousness and cross over the sar-chasm to reach the back of Riley’s mind. These quirky jokes land to varying degrees but there is very little freshness to the visual and conceptual world defined in Docter’s original. The formula holds well enough to make for a somewhat entertaining adventure, but it never breaks through into the more profound territory we have come to expect out of Pixar.

Some amount of uniqueness comes from the new emotions, again spearheaded by anxiety. Hawke brings a frantic energy that can at times feel like Riley’s brain is on fire. The rest of the newcomers impact the story and tone of Inside Out 2 much less. Edebiri is spirited as Envy but the script uses her mostly as Anxiety Jr. Ennui mostly sits around, being very French and disinterested in the goings on of Riley’s head. Most baffling of all is Embarrassment, who hides in his sweater most of the film but also assists Sadness (a returning Phyllis Smith) in subverting Anxiety’s aims for no clear reason other than the story needing a double agent. While the new bunch is a mixed bag, the real problem with Inside Out 2 is its inability to capture the spirit of the first film.

Inside Out was full of cute actualizations of psychological processes. The emotions were identifiable to anyone who had ever lost their shit, like Anger (Lewis Black,) or freaked out over being called on in class, like Fear (Bill Hader in the original, replaced by Tony Hale for the sequel.) But what made Inside Out relatable wasn’t the little sprite-like emotions running around Riley’s head, it was the specificity of this kid’s journey in growing up that resonated so widely. Alongside the meta jokes were moments of childlike wonder, like Joy watching the memory of Riley learning to skate and gliding along with it. In that moment Joy is a parent, marveling at her little girl, desperately wanting to protect her from her own feelings. Anyone could picture their own moment of childhood bliss, uncorrupted by sadness, and revel in the beauty on screen, whether or not they ever set foot on ice.

Inside Out 2 is disinterested in those ideas. Aside from a single depiction of a panic attack, there is little in the film that captures pubescent awkwardness as cleanly and vividly as the standout moments in Inside Out. Here Anxiety acts as more of a clearly defined villain, needing to be suppressed and controlled rather than incorporated as a member of the team. Peeks inside the minds of adult characters confirm this as well. Where the first film was devastating in its incisive depiction of growing up as a process of letting go and feeling all your emotions, Inside Out 2 struggles to expand or challenge that idea. Perhaps Riley learns to balance competing visions of herself, but even that is ill defined.

In search of the universal, Inside Out 2 broadens itself into a film that never feels genuine enough to connect to in a meaningful way. Five new emotions appear, yet the result is so much less emotionally cathartic than the first film. The result is a film that tries to trade authenticity for relatability and ends up as a lesser depiction of human interiority than Inside Out and a far inferior look at puberty than Turning Red. 6/10