Inside Out 2 is proof it’s possible to do something right twice

This is a PG movie that is aimed at adults. It’s highly clever and extremely entertaining – not to mention LOL funny.

2 min read

9:53AMJune 20, 2024

Inside Out is a PG movie that is aimed at adults.

The animated comedy-drama Inside Out 2 is proof that it’s possible to do something right twice. If an emotion or feeling was attached to this achievement it might be self-confidence or, from a hope-it-fails perspective, schadenfreude.

That last sentiment was one the director, Kelsey Mann, a Pixar regular in his feature debut, considered but decided not to include in this sequel to Inside Out (2015), which was a smash hit and won an Oscar.

Not to worry: on the early box office returns of this movie, set two years later when the main character, Riley Andersen, is 13, there will be more mental pleasures and pains to include in a third instalment.

In the first movie, the main emotions in 11-year-old Riley’s life are Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale), Sadness (Phyllis Smith) and Disgust (Liza Lapira). Joy is in charge and Riley is a happy A-grade student who is good at ice hockey.

The pivotal point in this sequel comes when an alarm goes off at Emotion HQ. It’s the puberty warning light flashing red. A group of minion-like characters arrive and start wrecking the joint. One puts up a sign: Puberty is Mess.

It is, and this is where the new emotions enter the fray. They are led by Anxiety (Maya Hawke) and include Envy (Ayo Edebiri) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser). There’s also Ennui (Adele Exarchopoulos), who speaks with a French accent, looks at her phone all day and barely leaves the couch.

Riley (Kensington Tallman, replacing Kaitlyn Davis from the first film), a contender for a high school hockey team, drops her best friends and ingratiates herself with the slightly older girls who are already in the squad. It’s capital A adolescence.

This is the set-up. Riley is caught between who she is and who she thinks she wants to be. The emotions who have looked after her for 13 years come into conflict with the new emotions who want to take her into adulthood. “My job,’’ Anxiety says, “is to protect her from the scary stuff she can’t see.”

The result is highly clever and extremely entertaining. This is a PG movie that is aimed at adults.

At times it’s akin to a (humorous, colourful) counselling session that discusses large ideas such as what to do with bad memories and repressed emotions.

There’s a perceptive moment when glass-half-full Joy is asked whether she is delusional. Her response is surprising, as is the embrace of the fellow emotion who goes to her comfort.

For this viewer the best scene comes when the old emotions are incarcerated in a vault where they meet Riley’s abandoned childhood attachments, such as a cartoon dog from a TV show, a handsome swordsman from a video game and, lurking in the background, a Dark Secret. It is LOL funny.

There are also comic touches when new emotions arrive but are told it’s not their time. Nostalgia (Jane Squibb), who looks like a sweet grandmother, is told to return in a decade.

Sarcasm makes a brief appearance – descending on Emotion HQ like a natural disaster – and this makes me look forward to who will be in Riley’s mind space if there’s a third instalment, in which she’s in her mid or late teens.