Inside Out 2 Footage Reaction: Pixar Has A Promising, Clever & Hilarious Sequel On The Way
Pixar brought "Inside Out" to theaters in 2015, and even though the story was squarely focused on an 11-year old girl named Riley and all the emotions she felt when moving across the United States, away from her childhood home, audiences easily identified with all the emotional trials and tribulations that come with growing up. Director Pete Docter and the animation studio effectively made tears come out of our face by imagining the feelings that our own feelings have inside our mind, and the movie easily ranks as one of Pixar's best.
Now, nearly a decade later, director Kelsey Mann is tapping back into Riley's mind as she embarks on the even more complicated hurdle of becoming a teenager, complete with a new range of complex emotions that throw headquarters and the core emotions of Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Liza Lapira), and Fear (Tony Hale) into a tizzy.
As we've seen in the trailer for "Inside Out 2," after a demolition crew tears through headquarters and updates the Riley's mind console, the core emotions meet Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adele Exarchopoulos), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), just as Riley is about to head off to hockey camp for the summer. As Riley struggles with her own identity in the wake of these new developments, the recently arrived emotions take over headquarters and suppress the core emotions that have been behind the console for Riley's entire life. But that's not the only new thing inside Riley's mind.
During an early press day for "Inside Out 2," Pixar invited /Film to their animation headquarters in Emeryville, California to see the first 35 minutes of the animated sequel (before the same footage debuted at CinemaCon last week) and hear from the many filmmakers bringing the movie to life (more on that later). I'm happy to report that the first act of the movie is hilarious and clever, complete with innovative and visually dazzling new developments that enhance the already mesmerizing world inside Riley's mind.
Let's play some hockey!
Hockey plays a big role in "Inside Out 2." The sport was one of Riley's favorite past-times in her Minnesota hometown, and she almost lost the passion for it while struggling to fit in upon arriving at her new home in San Francisco. Thankfully, she tapped back into her love for hitting the ice by the end of the first movie, and the sequel opens up with a gorgeously animated sequence that shows off Riley's skating skills while also reintroducing us to the core emotions.
Joy acts as a lively sports commentator as Riley (voiced by Kensington Tallman) flies around the ice, showing that she's quite the impressive young player. The animation of Riley on the ice is so slick that it almost feels like it could have been motion-captured and then stylized into computer animation. Of course, that's not how Pixar operates, but that's how smooth the movements of Riley and the rest of the human characters appear on-screen. The hockey sequences feel straight out of a Disney sports movie, and it makes me wish they would revive "The Mighty Ducks" franchise in an animation form.
Meanwhile, inside Riley's mind, all of the emotions are comfortable and content with the balance they've struck in Riley's life. They each get a chance to shine while Riley plays her heart out on the ice, with Anger getting some of the best standout moments. It hits all the right beats to remind you what made these characters so great together and what makes each of them such a treat to watch. But it also sets up the integral part that hockey is about to play in Riley's story, as she and her two best friends are invited at the last minute to a three-day hockey skills camp that could take them from the young Foghorns team to the more grown up Firehawks team, where there's an another exceptional teen girl player that Riley greatly admires.
While the return of the core emotions is thoroughly entertaining as we dig into this chapter in Riley's life, I couldn't help but miss Mindy Kaling and Bill Hader as Disgust and Fear, respectively. Tony Hale makes for a satisfying replacement for Fear, with a voice that easily encapsulates the feeling, albeit in a different way. But Liza Lapira doesn't quite match the heir of superiority and revulsion that Mindy Kaling brought to the character. She's a serviceable replacement, but it kinda feels like the kind of straight-to-video compromise Disney would have made a couple decades ago when big name actors were too expensive.
Riley's belief system, sense of self, and more
There have been some other changes since we last went inside Riley's mind too. Riley's personality islands are still strong, though Boy Band Island has broken up, and Family Island isn't nearly as big as Friendship Island. Now, there's also an elegant new layer known as Riley's belief system. From headquarters, there's an elevator that drops down deep into the root of Riley's mind, even below the dark, gray area where faded memories crumble away. In here, strings of light come down from the ceiling and tie themselves to core memories from Riley's life that help establish a variety of beliefs that she has about people, places, things, and even more complex concepts in the world around her. For example, while Riley firmly believes that homework should be illegal, she also believes that she's a really good friend.
The sequence that introduces the belief system is stunning, showing off an abstract space that makes something complex easy to understand for children while providing truly beautiful visuals for adults to appreciate. Not unlike the core memories from the first movie, these are all tied to pivotal emotions that Riley felt during these times. When the strings of light are plucked like the strings of an instrument, the sound of Riley's memory echoes in this enchanting chamber.
The belief system strings combine to form Riley's sense of self, which is visualized in the form of an ethereal piece of artwork in the middle of headquarters, where the core emotions operate. Joy considers this to be their masterpiece, and it's an integral part of how they've guided Riley to become the girl she is today. This is how Riley has determined that she's a good person. But it also can potentially create some hurdles for Riley to overcome, things that might make her question herself. For example, when Riley remembers that a penalty during the game almost cost them a victory, she begins to worry that she might mess up at camp and ruin her future in hockey.
But Joy has come up with a way to deal with these moments by installing a special tube that takes those problematic memories and fires them into the back of Riley's mind, where they won't really bother her anymore. That won't come back to haunt Joy in some significant way, right?
The new emotions
Wouldn't you know it, on the day that Riley is supposed to heads off to camp, her mind (and body) is about to experience a drastic overhaul thanks to puberty. As the trailer has illustrated, when the alarm sounds, a demo crew comes in, knocks down and blows up walls, updates the headquarters console, and leaves everything in shambles when the work whistle blows. So when Riley wakes up, she's experiencing drastic mood swings, has some smelly armpits, and just can't deal with her parents. It all happens so quickly.
Along with that, when Riley arrives at hockey camp, she's suddenly experiencing some new emotions, which totally catch Joy and the crew off guard. Anxiety is the most prominent, and because of her, Riley really starts to act in a variety of ways that are uncharacteristic of who she previously believed herself to be. See, that's where the belief system and sense of self comes in. Anxiety is basically the Joy of the new team of emotions. She acts as their leader, and because she's so concerned with Riley's future, Anxiety begins driving all of Riley's decision-making.
Maya Hawke is wonderful as Anxiety. She speaks quickly with a timid urgency, and although she becomes an adversary for Joy and the core emotions, she never feels like a full-on villain. It's kinda perfect, since anxiety has that way of making ridiculous thoughts sound perfectly reasonable when we're at our most vulnerable moments in life. But the rest of the new emotions are a delight too. Ayo Edebiri (who will be directing an episode of "The Bear" season 3) speaks with the right sense of admiration and desire as Envy, Adele Exarchopoulos is perfectly lackadaisical and effortlessly cool with her French attitude breathing life into Ennui (a name Joy can't seem to get a grasp on), and Embarrassment is just an adorable big guy voiced with nervous and shy whimpers without any actual dialogue, making for a unique performance from Paul Walter Hauser, who will likely have a pivotal moment where he finally speaks, not unlike Kevin Smith's Silent Bob.
Anxiety also has great respect for Joy, in fact she's a fan who squeals with glee when she meets Joy for the first time. But she can't help but act in support of what she believes is in the best interest for Riley, even if it means betraying and rebuilding Riley's belief system and sense of self, which eventually leads her and the rest of the new emotions to overpower the core emotions and literally bottling them up to launch into the back of Riley's mind, which is where we were left hanging at the end of the footage presentation at Pixar. However, we have another story on the way that teases a couple hilarious new characters we'll meet in the back of Riley's mind.
A promising start to a sequel with high expectations
With "Inside Out" sitting towards the top of Pixar's favorite movies, at least from my perspective, the pressure was on for the animation studio to deliver a story that demanded to be told. Though the sequel seems simple in its approach, essentially picking up where we left off and following Riley into an integral moment in her adolescent growth, the foundation of "Inside Out" allows the sequel to tread entirely different territory than "Turning Red," which also took a unique approach to the coming-of-age story of a developing girl. But where that movie put more of a focus on generational trauma within an immigrant family, as well as a read on queer identity, "Inside Out" puts the spotlight more on how our emotions evolve and threaten to betray who we are and how we perceive and present ourselves to the rest of the world.
"Inside Out 2" builds magnificently on the core of what the first "Inside Out" established, but provides innovative and clever ways of presenting complicated new concepts, so children can understand them easily and adults can be entertained as they recall exactly what those moments of self-discovery felt like. Also, it should be noted, while a lot of this sounds big and serious, "Inside Out 2" is also extremely funny. The personalities of all the emotions are inherently entertaining, and watching Riley's drastic changes as she experiences puberty and embarrasses herself is hilarious and cringeworthy at the same time. However, what I'm waiting to see is how the second and third acts resolve the story and deliver something that is at least equally as touching and heartfelt as the first movie.
As of now, the footage revealed to us at Pixar gives me confidence that Pixar has another wonderful movie on their hands, and it has the potential to be one of their best sequels yet. Hopefully Pixar sticks the landing when the full movie is released in theaters on June 14, 2024.