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| Images courtesy Disney/Pixar |
Disney/Pixar’s newest animated feature, a sequel to 2015’s Inside Out, is another delightful visit to the inner workings of the mind. Directed by Kelsey Mann, it follows the further adventures of Riley (Kensington Tallman) and her emotions as they navigate life at the start of puberty. Riley, now thirteen, is forming a sense of self driven by deeper, more complex feelings which then become beliefs about herself. When the Puberty alarm goes off, four brand-new emotions appear, making things much more complicated – both for Riley, and for her core emotions.
As in the first film, Inside Out 2 creates an internal world to illustrate what Riley is going through as she attends a hockey camp run by her future high school coach. Worried that she won’t make the team and become part of a popular group, Riley is primarily driven by her new Anxiety (Maya Hawke) – a frazzled little emotion concerned with all of the things that could possibly go wrong. As the newer emotions crowd out the core five (Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Fear and Anger), literally bottling them up and sending them to “the Vault”, the metaphors become spot-on as Riley’s mind swirls with unfamiliar feelings.
The focus in this film is on Riley’s developing sense of self, and how it can easily be shifted and changed. She’s still learning who she is, and at first, Joy (Amy Poehler) tries to guide this development in her own image. Anxiety, and her cohorts Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) take over, and Riley begins to doubt herself and her hopes for friendship with the popular Valentina (Lilimar) as well as her future in hockey. Under their influence, she becomes obsessed with fitting in and ditches her two best friends for Val’s group, all while Joy and the other core emotions try to get back to headquarters and save her from becoming someone she is not.
The greatest strength of this film is its treatment of Anxiety; it would be easy to code her as a villain, as her actions hurt Riley and make things very difficult for Joy and the others when she takes over. But she’s just trying to cover the bases, knowing that life is becoming more complicated as Riley grows up, and she genuinely believes that she’s helping when she sends the original sense of selfhood into the back of the mind, where forgotten memories go. She tries to build Riley up to be prepared for the worst, and in the process, creates a confusing identity of nervous energy. But even negative emotions can teach us something, especially during adolescence, and the film deftly demonstrates this in how it ultimately deals with Anxiety and the other newer feelings.
While it doesn’t pack as much of an emotional punch as its predecessor, Inside Out 2 is still extremely entertaining, and its lessons about the nature of developing selfhood are told in an accessible manner with its clever metaphors and treatment of its symbolic emotive characters. It is a tribute to the perplexing, tumultuous teenage years, and reminds us all of the delicacy of our own senses of self as we branch out into the complex world, trying to hold on to what is truly important to us in the midst of internal conflict.
-Dana Culling