Wait. Pixar finally has a quality animated film hitting theaters? Granted, it\u2019s a sequel. But after seeing \u201cTurning Red\u201d pushed to Disney+ while a lukewarm film like \u201cLightyear\u201d took its theatrical place, it\u2019s taken far too many years for the studio to have a distinguished domestically released animated adventure. Even as a reintroduction to a familiar world, Kelsey Mann\u2019s feature directorial debut \u201cInside Out 2,\u201d a zippy yet gooey animated quest about belonging and individuality during teenage girlhood feels like a final, albeit predictable, return to normalcy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The peppy sequel begins with the upbeat Joy (Amy Poehler) believing she has perfected an unimpeachable system. With the help of the usual crew\u2014Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale), and Disgust (Liza Lapira)\u2014she deposits the glass balls holding Riley\u2019s worst memories to a distant realm called the \u2018back of the mind’ and\u00a0deposits the best moments to an underground lake whose glowing tendrils reach from the glimmering waters toward the sky, forming the girl\u2019s core beliefs. \u201cI am a good person,\u201d Riley often repeats to herself.\u00a0<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t really argue with Joy\u2019s methods. Riley, now 13 years old, is giving, smart, and, by Joy\u2019s own account, exceptional. The girl who once feared loneliness in her new Bay Area surroundings has a tight-knit friend group too: Grace (Grace Lu) and Bree (Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green). The trio are so close that they\u2019ve formed a formidable team on their hockey squad. They\u2019ve even caught the eye of Coach Roberts (Yvette Nicole Brown), a high school hockey coach who has invited them to a three-day camp where players like Val Ortiz (Lilimar)\u2014Riley\u2019s hero\u2014attend. For Joy and her cohorts, you can\u2019t ask for much more.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein\u2019s broad screenplay throws the biggest, most obvious obstacle possible at the teenager Riley: Puberty. A late-night alarm, in fact, announces its beginning, leading to some additional emotions appearing: the light-emo silence of Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), the French beatnik Ennui (Ad\u00e8le Exarchopoulos), the needy\u00a0Envy (Ayo Edebiri), and an ambitious Anxiety (Maya Hawke). When Riley learns her best friends will be attending a different high school next year, Anxiety takes it upon herself to wholly recraft Riley in the hopes that new version of her will impress Val. She throws away Riley’s present sense of self to the back of her mind and exiles Joy and the other old emotions. It\u2019s up to Joy and company to restore Riley\u2019s former sense, journeying to the back of the mind, before Anxiety totally upends Riley\u2019s ability to function.<\/p>\n
Mann doesn\u2019t necessarily break the formula the first \u201cInside Out\u201d established. This is a fairly straightforward yet affecting story about Joy and Anxiety, both realizing that personhood can\u2019t be reverse-engineered. Riley is so focused on gaining Val\u2019s approval, thereby negating her former best friends, that she merely reflects Val rather than herself. She is also so driven by her competitive desires that she only feels satisfaction whenever she either gains approval from Val or proves her competitive dominance. Seeing Anxiety remold Riley into a blank character as Joy and the other emotions trace through the recesses of Riley\u2019s mind makes for a mostly satisfying structure, allowing the film to assuredly bounce through visually dazzling blitzes of color and whimsy for an intoxicating style that at once feels gentle, fun, and safely crowd-pleasing as it deals with the pressure of being a teenage girl trying to conform to the lofty standards set by other teenage girls.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
That doesn\u2019t mean new jokes aren\u2019t added along the way: a nightmare fueling “Blue\u2019s Clues”-inspired character, a scene in Imagination Land recalling \u201cNineteen Eighty-Four,\u201d and Mount Crushmore are sharp zingers. The new emotions, however, aren\u2019t as memorable as the primary characters from the prior film. For such an urgent emotion, Envy pretty much fades into the background. Embarrassment has its moments, particularly when put in conversation with Sadness. Ennui\u2019s act wears a tad thin after its initial fast start\u2014the moodiness of being French is understandably a great well to keep hitting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
None of the new characters carry the same heartbreaking resonance as Bing Bong, who, admittedly, is among the greatest\u00a0animated characters of the past decade. It\u2019s surprising, then, that Anxiety and Joy barely have any scenes together. Maybe trying to recreate the two-handed dynamic that fueled the first film felt too obvious of a narrative choice. But without much else to replace it, the film does lean heavily on the barrage of jokes it throws at the viewer to carry it through its predictable maneuvering.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wait. Pixar finally has a quality animated film hitting theaters? Granted, it\u2019s a sequel. But after seeing \u201cTurning Red\u201d pushed to Disney+ while a lukewarm film like \u201cLightyear\u201d took its theatrical place, it\u2019s taken far too many years for the studio to have a distinguished domestically released animated adventure. Even as a reintroduction to a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[35,34,33,45,32],"class_list":["post-1198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comedy-movies","tag-adventure","tag-animation","tag-comedy","tag-drama","tag-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}