Inside Out 2

I didn't love Inside Out like most others. I loved the idea, even if the visual representation of mental and psychological concepts often got too literal. Portraying emotions as living entities within us, and the struggles between them, has a lot of potential. For me, Inside Out's biggest problem was in its slavish adherence to The Pixar Formula: anthropomorphize something that isn't alive or sentient, and make them get lost so that they have a physical journey to match the mental one they must go on to grow as a character. It is a formula they've employed for literal decades, to varying degrees of success. For every Toy Story, there's The Good Dinosaur. By the time Inside Out came around, I was tired of the literal-journey-paired-with-emotional-journey metaphor. Guess what Inside Out 2 does. Go on, guess. Again, I do have to give credit to the concept of Inside Out 2. Riley is now a teenager (13) and is facing newer, more complex emotions. Ennui, Embarrassment, Envy, and Anxiety (why are they all negative?) arrive just as Riley is facing turmoil in her friend group and possibly befriending a cool older kid she idolizes. As she is torn between chasing status and staying loyal to her best friends, Anxiety takes over. It is a simplified but otherwise accurate depiction of the turmoil inside a young teen's head, as they constantly worry about status and public appearance, and attempt to scheme out every possible outcome in the hopes of avoiding every negative possibility. We've all lived it, we all know it's true. The anxiety Riley feels makes her make bad choices, things that go against her character. Inside her, Joy and the original crew are exiled from the control room and have to find their way back to restore Riley's sense of self (visualized as a knot of glowing threads) before she is corrupted. Therein lies the first fault with Inside Out 2 -- it's basically Inside Out all over again, just with more characters. It's not just because The Pixar Formula. If it was, we could say Toy Story 1 and 2 are the same movie. But we know they're not because of the substance of the stories. Inside Out 1 and 2, at their core, have almost no difference whatsoever. Both involve Riley suffering from emotional distress as Joy/Sadness (1) and Joy/Anger/Fear/Disgust/Sadness (2) are thrown out of the control room. Both involve Riley making some negative decisions and learning something about herself in the process. Even the situation Riley is in relies on the same basic principle: being an outsider (new town/school in the first movie, away at a soccer camp with high school kids in this one). The literal interpretations of psychological concepts are back, like a stream of consciousness literally being a river, but they're getting worse. Sarcasm is defined with a large valley in the landscape of Riley's mind ... because the word "sarcasm" contains the word "chasm". Get it? But the bigger problem with this lack of originality is that it feels less like the next logical step in the story and more like a corporate mandate. Disney has struggled post-pandemic (even post-Avengers; Endgame), and Pixar has been no exception. Movies like Luca and Turning Red were dumped on Disney Plus, giving them a direct-to-video reputation (and Turning Red got caught in some ridiculous culture war BS). Lightyear failed, and while Elemental was financially successful, it is a divisive movie at best. Inside Out 2 feels like an over-correction to Disney's failed investments. It reeks of a no-risks-allowed, do-what-worked-before mentality that prioritizes the bottom line over artistic exploration. Making another movie about the same universal experience makes Inside Out 2 feel distant and impersonal. I have no frame of reference for being an Asian teenage girl, but Turning Red told a story that made me understand. I didn't lose my father at an early age, but Onward laid out its story in a way that made me understand what the characters were feeling (even if I didn't like the movie overall). Inside Out 2 is too one-size-fits-all. It uses universality as a shortcut, not as a foundation. There is no unique personality to Inside Out 2, just more of the same. And speaking of taking the shortcut, the writing of this movie. Inside Out 2 does something I absolutely loathe in a sequel, and that is the character reset. At the end of Inside Out, Joy learned that all-happy-all-the-time was not only untenable, but dangerous to the growth of Riley. She had to experience sadness to appreciate happiness. She had to feel angry and disgust and fear, and these feelings even had to mix to produce feelings like bittersweetness, revulsion, and nervous excitement. Inside Out 2 chucks all of that out the window the moment the new feelings arrive. Joey cannot comprehend that Riley will develop more complex emotions, and that by repressing them, she's repressing Riley's growth as a person. It goes back to the no-risks-allowed mentality that permeates this carbon copy of the original. If you're gonna tell the same story, go the full nine. Reset the characters. Who cares about logic from movie to movie. And it's a damned shame, because the anxieties of being a young teenager are a fantastic gold mine for this concept. The pressure to fit in, the self-doubt, the fear of high school and older teenagers, friend groups drifting apart, the doubts that come with every choice and every step ... we've all felt it. There is a way to tell this story and make it have resonance and impact with everyone. Coincidentally enough, Disney itself is so afraid of the unknown and its audience drifting away and where it fits in the marketplace that, with Inside Out 2, it resorted to lazy conformity. It told a story they'd already told before, and this time, they didn't even bother to change the names.