Inside Out 2

dIr: Kelsey Mann

2024

You don’t have to tell me, I already agree with you. You’re right: Inside Out didn’t need a sequel. It was perfect as it was, a pristine thing of beauty, something to hold up as evidence that late-stage Pixar could still put out decent flicks long after its heyday.

And yet they made this, it was a massive success, it raked in all the moneys, and Disney execs get to rub even more cold hard cash all over their bodies, and we’re the chumps left crying in our seats or in the gutter.

Fully admitting that, I still enjoyed the flick, and I don’t think it’s a drop in quality at all. Even if it feels a bit unnecessary at the end, it’s okay. The metaphor still holds up.

Hostages as we are to our hormones and our emotions, we continue the story of teenager Riley as seen through the portholes that are her eyes by the emotions that animate her entire being through a control console of buttons, levers and, I dunno, flanges maybe. All the ‘old’ emotions are back, especially Sadness (Phyllis Smith), my absolute favourite, but a growing Riley, who has just hit puberty, finds herself at the mercy of a whole new set of emotions / feelings.

As in the first flick, which had the parallel stories of Riley trying to cope with her family moving from Minnesota to San Francisco and her anthropomorphised emotions travelling through the landscape of her mind in order to save her from her own bad decisions, the true villain in both films is Joy (Amy Pohler). Everything bad that happens ultimately happened because of Joy’s delusional, default denial state. She says she’s doing all this shit for Riley’s sake, but we know better. Comparison may be the thief of Joy, but Joy is the supreme overacting overthinking fucker-upper that nearly ruins everything in both movies. She is the worm in the apple, the serpent in the garden, the prime evil.

Once Riley flips into surly pubescent teenager mode, the control board console / control room gets refurbished again, and the game gets more complicated, what with all the new interlopers. She has also started to develop a sense of self, which is objectified as something that looks like those plastic fountain-looking fibre optic objets de art that your auntie used to have in her lounge room way back in the 80s. This sculpture, that embodies and repeats the phrases that try to assert who Riley thinks she is, is easily discarded when those new, somehow more powerful emotions, turn up.

They are, of course, feelings like Envy, Ennui, Embarrassment and, most powerful of all, Anxiety (Maya Hawke).

Anxiety is so powerful and cunning that she contrives a way to expel all the other emotions from the control room in order to dominate everything Riley does at an ice hockey camp where she manages to alienate everyone she cares about and terrify a whole new group of people with her needy, desperate ways.

I know this is all meant to be entertaining and enjoyable for all ages, and it probably is, considering its success, but it’s painful watching Riley do this stuff. It’s not only painful as a parent, watching a kid you care about piling on stupid actions and making it worse, and worse and worse, and it should be, it’s doubly painful as a person remembering each and every time you’ve done something desperate and embarrassing in order to be liked by people who don’t give a single solitary fuck about you. Of course we know Riley’s doing the wrong thing, and watching the trainwreck happen in slow motion; that’s the hook – we can’t stop her any more than the emotions can, in time until the time is right.

It makes it, for me, all the more compelling when you forget about the allegorical elements, or how clever or not aspects of how parts of the human consciousness are depicted, even when the stakes are so low. Any of us who aren’t American or Canadian, possibly, would never get why hockey would be so important to Riley, or any sane person, for that matter, but we can appreciate how closely tied it is to her sense of self, especially after we’ve seen it so literalised. And even those who haven’t really experienced Anxiety in the clinical sense can appreciate how Riley is experiencing it, with there being a certain kind of logic to her motivations, which cascade nonetheless, as each fear-based thought escalates and escalates and escalates. The more powerful the imagination, the more things to imagine to overreact do, sending the body and the mind into overdrive.

It's depicted really well. I’m not going to argue how much sense it makes, since, well, that seems pointless. The point is not which stream (the world outside that Riley is in, or the world inside her head and heart) is more important; it’s whether they’re complementing each other in the storytelling the flick is trying to do. Of course Riley often is reduced to being such a cliché of a teenager that it almost defies the necessity of having brought the character back at all – but she’s real enough, and messy enough, to feel believable.

Her acting out amounts to being needy to new high status people, and cold shouldering her old friends, and fucking rude as to her parents (no need to be so harsh, Riley, jeez), and yes it’s all a bit generic, but that’s fine, because I don’t need or want a Pixar film where teen characters smoke meth or do horrible things with complete strangers. I need it to be low stakes because these flicks make me sob like a goofball as it is anyway.

And I think the way the film embraces the concept of the sense of self, and how manipulable it is, how it can be a life preserver but also an anchor around our necks, inhibiting us from growing, sometimes, because we can be so fragile when our view of ourselves is maintained too narrowly. Again it’s up to Sadness to save us all, and Riley, by showing Joy that trying to stifle Riley’s memories of her selfishness, or when she’s acted awfully towards other people, doesn’t make her more resilient or honest about who she is: it untethers her, just as much as all of Anxiety’s frantic actions do.

As a depiction of how all consuming, all encompassing anxiety can be for people, up to a point, it’s a somewhat illuminating representation. Again, I’m saying that I imagine that it could be helpful for some people who might not have experienced it in such a way themselves, or if they’re the kind of (infuriating) people who say supportive things like “just calm down” or “have you tried not being anxious about…?” No-one who ever thinks like that has ever helped anyone that way, in the same way that anyone who ever says “trust me” is never trustworthy.

Is it all resolved a bit too easily? Well, yes. And then everything is fine, and Riley goes on with her life. Why? What were you hoping for? A complex sequence of montages where Riley gets help from medical professionals or therapists, or from her parents? Scenes where cognitive behavioural techniques are explained to her at length and she adapts them with middling to positive results? Scenes where she’s doing yoga, spending time in the outdoors and connecting with people in order to feel more supported and not as alone?

Well… that would have been great, but probably falls outside the scope of this flick. Also, being made for Americans by Americans, had they done that they would have run the risk of being denounced by Scientologists, godbotherers in general and probably the anti-vax crowd for not saying that the real problem is a lack of Jesus / too much Xenu / fluoride in the water supply, and not mental health issues.

It’s all of course delivered in the entertaining package that you know and expect from the efforts of a number of celebrity voices and ten thousand programmers. It still feels a bit… minor, compared to their other efforts. Not as ambitious. More straightforward. Less risky. I don’t know what counts as ‘risky’ when you’re talking about a $200 million budgeted flick with McDonalds marketing tied in and merch opportunities, but it’s certainly not as ground-breaking as the first one was (but I guess that holds true of 99 per cent of unnecessary sequels).

It’s okay. It won’t traumatise your kids too much. That’s handy.

8 times I love that Lewis Black gets paid to voice Anger when every day he talks like that for free out of 10

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“I don't know how to stop Anxiety. Maybe we can't. Maybe this is what happens when you grow up. You feel less Joy.” - Inside Out 2