Inside Out 2 continues 2015’s tale of anthropomorphized emotions, and complicates them with puberty. When we last left Riley, she was an 11-year-old girl who moved from Minnesota to San Francisco. The original film’s co-director and co-screenwriter Pete Docter imagined five core emotions governing Riley’s mind, almost like officers on the bridge of the Enterprise in Star Trek, except they’re controlling a child and not a spaceship. It may have been nine years since the original film, and yet in this sequel Riley (now voiced by Kensington Tallman) has only aged two years. First-time director Kelsey Mann cannot quite capture the inventiveness and charm of the original, and yet how could he? The premise is familiar, not novel, and the new emotions strain the conceit until the jokes are more obvious than clever. Its heart is in the right place, with some moments of bittersweet poignancy, and yet this sequel is even more evidence that Pixar has lost its storytelling magic.
Rather than focus on a big event for a young teen, Mann and his screenwriters keep the stakes for Riley relatively low. Hockey is her primary passion, and the story follows her on an overnight hockey camp where her ultimate goal is to join a high school team as early as possible. At first, the emotions Joy (Amy Poehler) and her colleagues, including Sadness (Phyllis Smith) and Anger (Lewis Black), see this trip as an exciting new opportunity. But right around the time Riley arrives at camp, a new emotion—Anxiety (Maya Hawke)—arrives too, and she’s not alone. Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and Envy (Ayo Edebiri) have come along for the ride. Joy, a busybody with toxic positivity, still thinks that she is in charge, and yet Riley finds herself in new, relatively complicated social situations where Anxiety is better equipped to take the reins. Anxiety kicks the older emotions out of the control tower, so Joy and her pals wander through Riley’s memory and self-conscience in a race against time because Anxiety, in her zeal to prepare Riley, nearly gives her a panic attack.
Like the original film, Inside Out 2 is much easier to understand than describe. Mann shrewdly cuts between the emotions and Riley’s hockey camp, so that even young audiences will understand how the two worlds affect one another. There is also the specter of adolescence, since Envy forces Riley to abandon her older friends in favor of newer ones, while Ennui tries to make Riley seem cool and utterly fails. The film’s overall look is also key to its success. Each emotion is given a distinct color that matches its overall vibe—Anger is red, for example, while Disgust (Liza Lapira, formerly Mindy Kaling) is green—and the memory palace of Riley’s mind is teeming with bright colors and an attention to detail. At one point, Ennui pushes Riley into a typical teenage response, and the effect in her mind creates a physical obstacle for Joy and the others (I do not want to reveal the exact joke since it is a pun that is too deliciously groan-worthy to reveal).
Although the overall plot is simple enough to follow, Inside Out 2 can get lost in specifics. Riley is mature enough to develop a sense of self, represented as a pristine, sky blue tree, one that Anxiety obliterates because she thinks she has all the answers. The “sense of self tree” is a striking physical metaphor, though its overall power and purpose can be convoluted. There are other, stranger, scenes that do not work, like when Joy and her friends wander into the vault of Riley’s secrets, and discover a dumb cartoon she still loves from when she was younger. At its best, Inside Out included a tinge of recognition for its older audiences, a sophisticated understanding of emotion and memory that inevitably made adults think about their own past. It also had Bing Bong (Richard Kind), Riley’s discarded imaginary friend, one of Pixar’s cleverer secondary characters from its nearly 30-year run. The sequel looks for a Bing Bong replacement, to no avail, and instead there are too many agonizing moments where Anxiety runs Riley ragged.
Mann’s modest scale means that Riley never experiences the hardest parts of teenage years, like feeling big feelings for the first time, or moments of real alienation and loss. Maybe that is just as well, since a more honest emotional journey would not be good material for a film that is essentially a comedy—and one aimed at children at that. Still, this film has a good sense of how Anxiety, the emotion that works in overdrive for most teens (and adults) nowadays, gets its hooks into everyone. Midway through the film, there is a scene where Riley tries to fall asleep, and Anxiety goes through countless scenarios via projections of how the next day could be a disaster. It has been many years since I was 13, and yet I winced at this manifestation of Anxiety because—even with regular therapy—my anxiety disorder still sometimes manifests this way.
Combining that kind of wisdom with a palpable metaphor leads to occasional moments of brilliance in Inside Out 2, and yet for every clever idea, there are several that are relatively clumsy. An eager voice cast—all of whom personify their emotions or characters with ease—cannot quite smooth over a vague mix of action and subtext. Maybe when they get to Inside Out 3 and Riley is in the throes of teenage emotion and experimentation, we can see some real drama because, inevitably, she will face huge consequences when her emotions barely look out for her own self-interest.
Inside Out 2 (PG, 96 minutes) opens in theaters on June 14.