What if feelings had feelings? That would be the meme review for Pixar’s Inside Out (2015), a movie that works at a concept level as a stunning and simple metaphor, about adolescence and beginning to identify and understand our feelings. The message is profound and universal: we all feel the same things. What if those feelings operated as a zany control center within our heads? That is the platonic Pixar premise. Now, Inside Out 2 is more. Exponentially more. More deep feelings, more rounded, more emotions, more characters, and more hockey. It’s also a ton of fun, tender, and about how feelings come to form beliefs, and what we do with those beliefs, once we have them.
The first Inside Out benefits from how direct it feels. The film even tells us, let’s not complicate things, feelings are hard enough to understand. It gives us a command crew of characters as anthropomorphized emotions toil away in young Riley’s head, and the sensations she feels are new, small, and manageable. The sequel finds Riley entering prepubescence, joining a couple of her friends for a hockey skills competition camp, which might earn them a spot on the high school hockey team.
Meanwhile, in Riley’s interior thoughts, emotions have run amuck! The command center has been overtaken by Anxiety, Ennui, Embarrassment and Envy, each more abstract and more chaotic than those easy-to-comprehend emotions of the original film, Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Fear, and Anger. Now, we have all these characters to deal with. It’s so much. It’s so much more. And Pixar’s team has done a hell of a job, just keeping all these emotional plates in the air. The way the film handles the overload is by separating the camps. The old emotions are diverted, while these complex, new, and worryingly puberty-coded emotions take over and chaos reigns.
What the film does do more cleanly than the original is the dichotomy between the interior and exterior (er, inside and outside) stories. There is a much sharper balance and it feels better correlated to what is happening inside Riley’s head. We also spend less time jumping around inside other characters’ heads, which is good, because there is now so much to manage just with this one character. Meanwhile, we’re also introducing a stock of new characters — some older hockey players and a hockey coach. The whole movie revolves wonderfully around this hockey camp, as a serious and deeply searching exploration of the sport, as an iced-out canvas to tell the story of a young girl.
The challenges Riley faces are also new. She wants to fit in with the cool, older hockey players. Riley realizes upon arriving at the camp that her friends may soon be moving to a different school, so a fissure breaks out between the friends, and Riley opts to befriend the team captain, Val, seemingly something of a legend in local hockey. Meanwhile, Anxiety is running rampant inside her head, grasping onto every Core Memory she can find, and casting them into conflicting new beliefs Riley can have about herself. These are beautifully realized as these cords that reach up through Riley’s brain. The whole construction of the emotional layer and the metaphors within are not just expanded but beautified, and the animators chose new characters and action-focused sequel to show off that Pixar can continue to work at this singular level.
The film feels like a Redemption Act for Pixar, a renewed statement of their purpose and driving philosophy as an animation studio. While the studio famously works wonders in creating new IP and original ideas, Inside Out 2 proves its utility as a studio that can make a knockout theatrical animation after a string of quiet and mixed straight-to-Disney+ releases. This recentering of Pixar feels like a return to their halcyon days as a leading studio and is built with as much merit as some of their best work. Expertly animated. Deeply feeling and emotional. Utilizing the medium of animation to tell stories that can only belong there. Above all else, this is a great movie, and you’ll feel every moment.