Pixar Does Pubescence

The voices in your head just got a lot more boisterous. If Inside Out showed how major life disruptions affect the emotional development of a child, then Inside Out 2 doubles down with a hurricane of hormonal hassles otherwise known as puberty. And Disney/Pixar knows exactly how to modulate all the laughs and tears with plump, pat insights into the hilariously relatable, terrifyingly unstable inner life of a newly minted teen.

 This clever sequel to Pixar’s Oscar-winning 2015 hit features four new feelings — Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos ) — butting heads with the original quintet — Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale), and Disgust (Liza Lapira) — over who gets to control Riley Andersen (Kensington Tallman), now a 13-year-old girl with braces. And acne. And a social life that’s about to implode.

Riley is at that stage in life when her body changes, her friendships diverge, and her very sense of self is under attack. And that’s just when Anxiety nudges Joy out of the way. “Riley’s life is more complex,” Anxiety explains in her nervously chipper voice. She’s not wrong; Joy is in uncharted waters when it comes to navigating these waves. “Joy is so old-school,” sighs Ennui, who drapes herself over a nearby couch with a diffident air, occasionally taking command of the control console when needed — remotely with her smartphone, of course. 

INSIDE OUT 2 ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Kelsey Mann
Written by: Meg LeFauve, Dave Holstein
Starring: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Tony Hale, Liza Lapira, Maya Hawke, Ayo Edebiri, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Paul Walter Hauser, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan
Running time: 96 mins

Riley’s ice hockey exploits with besties Bree and Grace (Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green and Grace Lu) on the San Francisco middle school team the Foghorns have gotten them invited to a Bay Area Skills Camp. And that’s when her BFFs confess that they’re going to a different school in the fall. Right at the same time that the cool older hockey players, led by Valentina Ortiz (Lilimar Hernandez), invite Riley to hang with them. Does she bail on her old pals for a chance to make new ones? Does she betray her own identity so she can forge another? 

If Inside Out defined Riley by her Core Memories — neatly organized into “personality islands” representing concepts like family, friendship, and honesty — then this sequel introduces the Belief System — experiences that define her sense of self in aphorisms like “mom and dad are proud of me” and “I’m a really good friend.” The overall distillation for Riley: “I’m a good person.”  

Puberty scrambles all that, as do the new emotions, who, with Anxiety in charge, literally bottle up the original five and toss them out of the control room far out into the memory banks — specifically The Vault, where Riley’s deepest secrets are all kept hidden. And the new belief system that grows under Anxiety’s watch? A new, overriding thought: “I’m not good enough.” As with Inside Out, repression is at the heart of all the film’s conflicts, and the ultimate solution will involve all of them working harmoniously. 

Inside Out 2 is chock full of charm and intelligence, with witty new wordplay that makes our heroes float down a Stream of Consciousness before they face a sarcasm Chasm. It’s a delight to watch, especially when Pixar’s always-astonishing computer animation continues to be a jaw-slackening dazzlement. But all the pyrotechnics don’t help the film escape sequel retreads, in this case putting new skin on the same old quest that requires an exiled Joy to risk plunging from great heights and getting shot into glass tubes in order to make it back to the control console. 

The filmmakers also continue to present emotions as personified embodiments who, at times, weirdly have lots of other emotions. Joy feels anxiety; sadness gets happy; ennui shows surprise; Disgust seems aroused; even anger has his chill side. The conceit is inherently flawed because an engaging script cannot abide one-dimensional behavior. It needs characters. So much for archetypes.

Despite their veneer of sophistication, the undeniably entertaining Inside Out movies sweetly simplify life’s enigmas by refracting the human condition through the lens of behavioral psychology. Our entire essence, the films seem to suggest, depends entirely on our interactions with other people. Our experiences with those around us dictate who we are and who we will continue to become. It’s certainly a very social interpretation of what it means to be alive, but it’s also oddly reductive.

There’s no discussion of an inherent persona regardless of external stimulation. There’s no philosophizing about what someone’s essence might be in solitude. Most of all, there’s no essential mystery to how or why people behave in certain ways. Inside Out 2 insistently explains why people act the way that they do. It’s a very modern kind of story that wouldn’t have existed before the 20^th century, since behavioral psychology wasn’t even a field of study until the early 1900s. Psychology, with all its summarizing and categorizing, is certainly clarifying, but it’s a far cry from the profundities of Greek mythology and the haunting symbolism of Grimms’ fairy tales.

Inside Out 2 is a very up-to-date look at how the mind works. Which means its surfeit of insights—and utter lack of the ineffable—might just eventually make it feel kind of dated.