★★★★
Nine years have passed since our last visit to Riley’s mind, the setting of Pete Docter’s groundbreaking animation. Upside down. They weren’t nice. Not universally and certainly not for the studio that made said film. The signs of a prosperous past were already well felt in the Pixar production line, even before the misfortunes of the pandemic. Streaming is just the icing on the Disney ratatouille cake. In short, Pixar hasn’t had a hit since 2019. It’s a Dug eat Dug world and the stakes could hardly be higher. Thank God for Inside Out 2.
Although the tendency to mark every new Pixar release with comments about the studio’s declining fortunes and quality is tedious, there is relevance here. From debutant director Kelsey Mann, Inside Out 2 sees a brilliant young protégé devastated by internal turmoil. As things escalate, anxiety sets in and inspires a series of profoundly bad decisions. Familiar, right? There’s also a running gag about unwanted nostalgic appearances, although that’s perhaps more relevant to Disney. In recent, depressing remarks, Andrew Stanton might have thrown cold water on creative expression, but at least promised that Pixar wouldn’t turn to live-action remakes. Not yet.
Sequels – and especially those focused on the past – are of course not a long-term solution for Pixar. That said, Upside down has always lent itself to this option. It is in the last frames of this film that the horn of puberty first appears, which comes to life at the start of the second part. Riley was twelve, now she is thirteen. Prepare yourselves. The little girl of 2015, whose childhood was saved by the union of Amy Poehler’s Joy and Phyllis Smith’s Sadness, is now a truculent, turbulent, capricious teenager, prey to larger and more complex emotions . Frankly, Bing Bong earned a lucky escape.
Given the diversity of the pubescent experience, Mann’s film does a pretty good job of capturing the central – and most common – facets. They are Ennui, Embarrassment, Envy and Anxiety, each designed as an extra from the Jim Henson Workshop. The quality and definition of the animation is such that the characters share the exact texture and weight of the Muppet. The casting, too, is exceptional. To Anxiety, Maya Hawke brings an extremely irritating neediness, while Adèle Exarchopoulos proves an inspired choice for Ennui, her drawling lines and French accent. Boredom never aroused such amusement. Ayo Edebiri practically appears as – and with – Envy, while Paul Walter Hauser makes the most of a micro-part in Embarrassment, an emotion too paralyzed by his own social discomfort to speak for much of the film.
Oddly enough, the plot here is noticeably similar to that of its predecessor. As before, an essential component of Riley’s being is ejected from the seat of his mind. Joy, sadness, anger (Lewis Black), fear (Tony Hale, replacing Bill Hader) and disgust (Liza Lapira, replacing Mindy Kaling) must travel through the archives of memory and imagination to recover them. Such familiarity, however, helps reveal nuanced changes in the adolescent psyche. There are endless scenes and scripted gags to keep things spirited – including a “chasm” – and dazzling visuals to ignite one’s own budding imagination.
Nothing in Inside Out 2 will, as was the case in the first, reduce the audience to puddles of water. And yet, an emotionally intelligent screenplay from Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein takes inspiration from an era that rings perceptibly true. Early in the film, Riley’s emotional headquarters is destroyed by her own in-house demolition team. They carry a sign that says: “Be careful of the dust, puberty is complicated.” It’s too true but, when it comes to sensations, Inside Out 2 cleans. Tremendous.
T.S.