Directed by Kelsey Mann | Written by Mann, Meg LeFauve, and Dave Holstein | 96 min | ▲▲△△△
Pixar has had a stunning rate of success with its films, both as critical darlings and box office hits. I’d call the first couple of Toy Story movies, Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up stone cold classics, and as recent as two years ago one of their films was my pick for the best of the year.
But the problem with that level of excellence is that each new film has a lot to live up to, especially when it’s a direct sequel to one of their better offerings.
Inside Out from 2015 was startlingly impressive. It imagined the inner emotional life of an 11-year-old named Riley — her feelings anthropomorphized as cute primary-coloured cartoon creations: Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader then, now Tony Hale), Anger (Lewis Black), and Disgust (Mindy Kaling then, now Liza Lapira).
It’s been a couple years in movie time and Riley is 13. She’s off to a weekend hockey skills camp where she’s keen to get chosen for a team, this just as puberty comes knocking, introducing a collection of new, more complex emotions led by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), with Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) in cahoots.
The giddy-making prospect of these new emotional states complicating Riley’s life raised my expectations going in — the balancing act that the first film achieved was between a vivid, imaginative, and even educational movie for kids that was also sophisticated enough to provide winning entertainment for adults, one that successfully plucked at the heartstrings along the way.
Once again we have key characters — this time all five of the original, fundamental emotions — flung out of the control room in Riley’s head. They have to voyage into the back of Riley’s brain to find her absent Sense of Self — floating along the Stream of Consciousness this time rather than the Train of Thought, and look out for the Sar-Chasm! If Joy and her crew can’t locate and assert Riley’s Sense of Self, she’ll be inexorably changed by Anxiety and Envy, who are desperate to help Riley get on this hockey team in all the worst ways, including sacrificing her relationship with her two best friends. All of this is further complicated by repressed memories and belief systems, a little girl’s psyche a compelling and intricate setting for the story.
That said, the fresh ideas of Inside Out are rehashed with some clever wordplay but not a lot of actual fun. This is a film with roughly a laugh and a half in the totality of its script, and none of the genuine emotional resonance of its predecessor — you will not care for anyone like you did that pink elephant, Bing Bong.
The filmmakers miss a real opportunity for some actual depth and understanding about the challenges of adolescence, or at least, offer something that feels new to people who went through that turbulent time years ago. We get a cameo from Nostalgia (June Squibb), an emotion that’s not quite ready to come into Riley’s head — suggesting the possibility of an Inside Out 3 set later in the teen years — but none of this is as charming as it could be.
Put more simply, there’s still stuff here that’s valuable — especially the teachable thread about the potency of anxiety and its effect on someone’s personality — but there’s a whole lot less of a good time. Pixar’s Inside Out sequel is too often frenetic and irritating, having more in common with the frenzied energy of a Despicable Me sequel than its predecessor.
I’ll say it: Anxiety is the most annoying character in a Pixar movie since Mater in Cars. That may be the point — Anxiety is the ostensible antagonist, but she gets a huge amount of screen time, as much as Joy and her cohort. Anxiety is here to offer a lesson to the kids in the audience that it doesn’t matter how much you prepare and catastrophize, all you’ll win is grief while you lose sleep. Anxiety is desperate to protect Riley to the point of smothering her — we get it — but then we have to put up with her machinations for the entire movie. And, sadly, Ennui — who I was hoping would predominate as Riley adopts a protective air of cool boredom to try and fit in with new friends — has only a few lines.
The audience I saw the movie with laughed at a couple of sequences with 2D supporting characters named Bloofy (Ron Funches) and Pouchy (James Austin Johnson), who must be references to kids TV cartoons I’m too ancient to have seen as a child-free man (though a dramatic video game-based character, Lance Slashblade (Yong Yea), was definitely familiar from iterations of Final Fantasy).
We know where this is going: Riley’s going to locate some kind of understanding and maturity (way beyond her years, I should say) and apologize to her friends, she’s going to make her dreams come true despite her growing anxiety. None of this genuinely engages with the messiness of puberty… it’s too busy offering life lessons. Only the typical professionalism in the animation and the voice-actor performances makes the effort feel worthwhile.
I’m not sure I need to say it at this point, but the 3D presentation is as dark and frustrating as its ever been, a gimmick that’s wildly overstayed its welcome.
