It’s genuinely surprising to me that Pixar is still somewhat as acclaimed as it once was, nearly 13 years removed from what we’d all collectively agree was when the Golden Age of the studio came to an unceremonious close with Cars 2. This is a studio that has been hollowed out by its corporate masters, who were once kept at a decent distance from managerial oversight and algorithmic analysis by their structure, which enabled them a kind of autonomy uncommon in the world of Western Animation. There were no equals – Dreamworks oscillated between meme-y classics like the Shrek movies and dogshit that everyone mocked at the time, Sony was practically irrelevant, and Illumination barely existed as an independent creative force, given that they were still pumping out Dr. Seuss adaptations – to say nothing of the fact that they lacked any sort of proper competition from their supposed partners at Walt Disney Animation, who fired every one of their traditional animators in the hopes that fucking Meet the Robinsons could square up with the finest Pixar products of an era or that Robert Zemeckis’ dreams of a mo-cap future would pay off in some sort of practical innovation. But all good things come to an end. Cars 2, as well as the clusterfucks that were Brave and the canceled Newt, signaled the roadmap: They’d be a sequel-oriented studio, capitalizing on their existing IP and the hard work of that first generation of storytellers, with the occasional original concept coming along to try and remind people of that old-time Pixar magic. Sadly, Pete Docter’s Inside Out was one of those last glimpses of brilliance, and the time has come for it to be dragged out and “celebrated” through its exploitation.
I understand all of the complaints that well-considered and intelligent millennial critics have about Inside Out, and I agree with a lot of them – there’s a weirdly patronizing streak of therapy-speak platitudes that insult the emotional intelligence of the children and their parents in the audience, the mark of a movie just a little too enamored with its concept – but I think there’s a decent amount of respect that’s lost in understating the thoroughness of Docter’s writing and direction. Even if the concept is a bit hoary, with the five main emotions governing a personality operating in a tower and having their own strange power struggles in a metaphor run amok, it is still effective enough on a scene-to-scene level and painfully moving in its own right, and at least pretends to speak to the children in the crowd. May Bing-Bong rest in peace, and the Imaginary Friend who Loves to Play may be the last time, outside of Soul, perhaps, that a death in a Pixar movie has really had a fully shattering impact upon an audience. Richard Kind’s absence is felt in Kelsey Mann’s Inside Out 2, though new and genuinely funny characters cut from a similar cloth are pulled up from deep and dark cold storage inside the brain of now-teenaged Riley (Kensington Tallman), who has become obsessed with hockey in the interim between the first one and this sequel. Those five main emotions – Joy (Amy Poehler, whose paycheck for this project is the reason you’ll see some different names in the core-five cast), Anger (Lewis Black), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Liza Lapira, replacing Mindy Kaling), and Fear (Tony Hale, replacing Bill Hader) – have stopped their conflicts, realizing that they’re all useful, and have been helping Riley build a greater sense of self. She is a “Good Person,” with her ego represented as a knot created by a stream of emotions from the subconscious, where good memories are placed and grow long threads, knitted together into a sense of self up in headquarters.
On the night before Riley’s supposed to go to a hockey camp, where she’ll be performing in front of her potential high-school coach (Yvette Nicole Brown) and, more importantly, the cool older forward Val (Lillimar) that Riley idolizes, the emotions are shocked when the “Puberty” alarm goes off. Suddenly, their headquarters is being torn apart by a bunch of construction guys, their control board doesn’t work anymore, and new emotions appear. There’s the pipsqueak Envy (Ayo Edibiri), hoodie-clad giant Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser, who mainly whimpers), the cool French-coded and smartphone-attached Ennui (Adele Exarchopolous), and the manic Anxiety (Maya Hawke), who acts as our new villain here. When Riley finds out that her two best friends from Middle School aren’t going to the same school that she is, Anxiety makes a play for control, literally bottling up the older five emotions and letting the new ones take over. They toss out Riley’s old sense of self, discarding it to the pile of bad memories so that Anxiety can help her shape a new one, and the bottle with our four protagonists (Sadness escapes and Die Hards her way back up to the top of the tower) is placed in the suppressed memories vault alongside a childhood cartoon character (Ron Funches) and a video game crush (Yong Yea). They, of course, escape, and the movie’s main plot involves them trying to get that sense of self that Joy so carefully crafted and stopping Anxiety before she makes things even worse for Riley in her attempts to head off all possible bad futures.
If you’re expecting Riley to have a massive panic attack at a bad moment, well, you’re not wrong, but sadly, a giant bar of Xanax looking like Drix from Osmosis Jones doesn’t show up looking like John Cena at the ’08 Royal Rumble ready to hit Anxiety with an Attitude Adjustment. No, there’s plenty of smarm to go around, with our characters essentially having to learn the same lesson that they learned in the previous film (emotions can be good and bad, depending on how intense or all-consuming they are) to advance some personal development for the weird formless personality that they learn they’re somehow not there to shape, even though they’re doing exactly that. The metaphor feels a little more appropriate for a child-centric story, given how overwhelming these emotions feel to really young kids, and it should be decent enough for a young teenager, given how out-of-control puberty can make even the most well-adjusted.
But the introduction of new emotions beyond those base five feels like more of a concession to the ever-expansive nature of sequels as a “bigger-and-broader” form rather than a natural evolution of the plot, and it comes at the expense of potentially developing the already-established emotions in a way that might mirror their charge’s predicament. The nature of these characters should change with time, and they should evolve much like how our understanding of their depth does with age, but Docter, who couldn’t imagine a sequel, wrote them into a corner when Riley’s parents (Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan) were pictured having their own similar starting five (and who, strangely enough, don’t have these additional emotions in their mature brains), albeit with mustaches and/or hairstyles that better resembled their characters. These new characters are, at best, redundant – Anxiety is an even more cartoony Fear, etc. – and at worst, fully distracting from deepening the characters people already care about.
This isn’t to suggest that there aren’t good things about Inside Out 2, though they’re often buried in groan-worthy puns, much like they were last time around – a literal “stream of consciousness,” which the characters travel through, or the act of bottling up the emotions – and this might be the funniest Pixar movie in some time thanks to Hawke. Her character’s manic energy and aggressively cartoonish design are actually silly in a way that Pixar’s shied away from in recent years or failed at (Elemental comes to mind), and her enthusiasm mirrors Joy’s but manifests in a less soccer-mom type of cheerleading. Ironically enough, she gets the job done – she pushes Riley to new heights with her game, even as she sabotages her personal relationships, and one has to imagine what Michael Jordan’s control tower has to look like – and she’s effective at making that contrast in a genuinely entertaining way. But Funches, Yea, and an unnamed third voice actor (I am legitimately required not to say anything about them in writing this review) steal the show, given that they’re explicit comic relief and serve no other narrative purpose than to solve a small problem at one or two points. They’re just here to entertain, which is wonderful given how Pixar has failed at that in the last 10 years. Everything in a Pixar movie tends to serve the message they’re trying to impart; Aesops in Silicon Valley that see their purpose as providing audiences with moral edification rather than entertainment.
It was easier to obscure this fact when they were the only studio on the block crafting emotionally deep stories for the whole family, but now that they’ve got legitimate rivals in the sphere, one has to wonder what else this one-trick pony can do. The Spider-Verse movies expand the palette of animated styles in service of a well-constructed and rich story; the Dragon movies have created broad and fantastic mythology; and the Minions provide real entertainment aimed squarely at the children in the theater but do so in a fashion that entertains both the parents and the tuxedo-wearing shitposters that are there as well. The realism they’ve strived for in their animation is impressive, but they’re regularly surpassed by their peers in its application. Disney itself is able to compete with them in a way that they never were able to a decade ago – Frozen and Moana have had larger cultural impacts than any of the releases from their would-be prestige studio – and they seem to be stuck in a pattern where all they’re known for are these sequels, with their original concepts having been thoroughly devalued by their release on streaming platforms. Lightyear was supposed to be a big declaration as to what they could be in this new landscape, but that failed miserably, and Elemental failed to initially attract the same kind of audience that once came out to see Inside Out just on the virtue of the name-brand alone.
What Inside Out 2 proves is that Pixar cannot rest on its laurels anymore: their properties are bigger than they are, which has to smart given how heavily praised they were for being the brains behind Buzz and Woody. Few studios have hagiographies written about them with self-satisfied titles like Creativity, Inc.; it would do them well to try and remember that. But this was always, perhaps, the endgame with Disney acquiring them. Standing out isn’t an option in the portfolio, regardless of whether it’s Marvel, Lucasfilm, or Pixar. All they are is an asset in service of the price on the ticker, and it’s clear that Inside Out 2 will ignite the price on the Monday after its release and may send it into orbit, given that it will be heralded as the savior of the theatrical experience. But is that all there is to a fire?