- Inside Out 2
- Directed by Kelsey Mann
- Written by Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein
- Featuring the voices of Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith and Maya Hawke
- Classification G; 96 minutes
- Opens in theatres June 14
There is a popular, rather animated argument making the rounds that Pixar’s best days are behind it. The cartoon giant hasn’t released a true blockbuster – one beloved by both audiences and critics – since 2019′s Toy Story 4! The company has been hit by massive layoffs and internal restructuring! Its most innovative and diverse films have been shoved straight onto Disney+! The magic is as dead as Nemo’s mama.
This line of thinking, though, conveniently ignores history. Because the last time that everyone thought that Pixar’s digital sky was falling was just about a decade ago, when the studio was preparing to release Inside Out. Director Pete Docter’s deeply layered and fantastically clever film about the personified emotions guiding a young girl’s mind was released in theatres just as the chattering class – myself included – fretted that the house that Steve Jobs built was crumbling, one pixel at a time. Back in 2015, Pixar was weathering a number of tepidly received films (Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University), suffering from mass layoffs and coming off a stretch in which it didn’t release any theatrical titles at all. Sound familiar?
Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith and Lewis Black reprise their roles as Joy, Sadness and Anger in Inside Out 2.Pixar/Disney
But while the first Inside Out easily and quickly transformed Pixar skeptics into infinity-and-beyond boosters, I’m afraid to report that its sequel Inside Out 2 is not going to repeat history by turning things around on the strength of a single film. While the new movie is certainly (Buzz) lightyears ahead of the studio’s recent batch of films – including the middling Elemental, Luca and Onward – it is about as imaginative as its title (a simple ”2″ was the best that the Pixar brain trust could come up with?), and ultimately as necessary as a migraine. Perhaps now more than ever, the Pixar folks seem to be stuck inside their corporate heads instead of listening to their beating hearts.
There is promise in the premise, at least. Taking over from Docter, director Kelsey Mann – a member of Pixar’s vaunted Senior Creative Team who makes his feature debut here – takes the natural step of following Inside Out’s young hero Riley (Kensington Tallman) as she enters puberty, with the anthropomorphized emotions inside her head tasked with keeping up.
While the ever-positive Joy (Amy Poehler) ensures that her fellow emotions’ spirits are high – including Sadness (Phyllis Smith) and the amusingly hotheaded Anger (Lewis Black) – everything is thrown into turmoil once the new pubescent emotions of Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), Envy (Ayo Edebiri) and Ennui (Adele Exarchopoulos) suddenly enter Riley’s headspace.
That’s a smart, natural set-up. Yet while Inside Out’s narrative has ostensibly grown alongside Riley, there is not much of an evolution in terms of storytelling.
Like the first film, Joy comes up against confusing new emotions and has to find her own place inside her/Riley’s world. Like the first film, there are amusing explorations into different corners of Riley’s brain, including the introduction of the “Sar-Chasm“ (oh, that’s really clever, isn’t it?). And like the first film, the perspective smoothly switches from inside Riley’s consciousness to her life in the “real” world, which is now complicated by the social pressures of fitting in among new friends and figuring out how to navigate her changing body.
It is all pleasant enough to watch, albeit in a dispiritingly passive manner – you can easily anticipate the dramatic beats and never have to feign surprise at any point whatsoever, save for a handful of here-and-now cultural references that seem slightly off-brand for Pixar, which has always aimed for a classical timelessness.
Everything in Riley’s world is thrown into turmoil once new pubescent emotions suddenly enter her headspace.Pixar/Disney
Even the voice performances feel like off-brand imitations of what worked best in the first film – and in a few cases, this is exactly the case. While Poehler, Smith and Black have returned to their roles, Bill Hader has been replaced by Tony Hale as the emotion Fear, while Liza Lapira has been swapped in for Mindy Kaling as Disgust. These lower-cost substitutes aren’t as disrespectful switcheroos as, say, casting Chris Evans over Tim Allen in 2022′s Lightyear, but they underline the lesser-than vibe that courses through so much of Inside Out 2. Add in the underwhelming work from newcomers Hawke and the normally reliable Edebiri, and it’s enough to make you wonder what was going on inside the head of Pixar’s casting department.
This all might land as unfair criticism for such an ambitious and defiantly original property as Inside Out. In an animated landscape plagued by the dull likes of Garfield, the fact that Pixar is able to sell such a cerebral premise should be celebrated. But while the first Inside Out was the product of serious-minded artists exploring big-swing ideas with the gentle touch of ace entertainers, the follow-up feels just a few brain cells up from making yet another movie about talking race cars.
At some point during Inside Out 2′s development process – perhaps when that title was locked; good lord, it’s awful – it was decided that being merely good was good enough, a life lesson that Riley herself would balk at. This is not the innovative, cutting-edge filmmaking that Pixar built its name on. What was once the product of pure imagination feels reduced to brand obligation.
Before work on Inside Out 3 inevitably begins – perhaps Poehler will ask for too much money and will be replaced by, I dunno, Sydney Sweeney – someone high up inside the company needs to give their heads a shake. There’s no need to second these emotions.