In Inside Out 2, a Teenager's Mind May Prove Too Much for Pixar to Handle

Inside Out 2 has the auspicious honor of being the first film released under Pixar's new marketing plan, and it shows.

In May of this year, Pixar president Jim Morris confirmed to Bloomberg that every second release from the studio would be a sequel or spin-off.

The studio that made legend with films like Toy Story, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo is now reportedly focusing on expanding existing intellectual property.

It's easy to understand why this happened.

At the start of the pandemic, Pixar released three original films – Soul, Luca and Turning Red – directly to its streaming platform. They all had Rotten Tomatoes scores in the 90s and were praised by critics as intelligent and sensitive stories for children. But they didn't make much money. The latest punch for Pixar's original stories came in the form of Elemental, which recorded Pixar's worst opening box office numbers, despite going on to gross nearly half -billion dollars worldwide.

Meanwhile, nostalgia-driven sequels like Incredibles 2 and Finding Dory were grossing billions at the box office.

And that's how we arrived at Inside Out 2.

Puberty blues

In the famous original Inside Out, we were introduced to Riley, a pre-teen with a pre-teen's collection of basic emotions, which also happen to be distinct characters here: joy, sadness, sadness, fear, disgust and anger.

Today, Riley is 13 years old and a lot has changed. She's bigger, smellier, and she has a defined sense of self, literally represented by a bright tangle of beliefs born from memories.

It also accommodates a range of puberty-induced emotions, including embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), envy (Ayo Edebiri), boredom (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and anxiety (Maya Hawke).

Worse yet, these new, mature emotions chose to surface on the weekend Riley leaves for an all-important hockey camp with her best friends. During the car ride, Riley's friends reveal that they will not be attending the same high school this coming year.

This all sets off a sequence of events that leaves anxiety in the driver's seat, and those OG emotions, along with Riley's sense of self, pushed to the back of Riley's mind along with all the unwanted memories.

Joy and the gang must navigate chasms, imaginariums, and a sea of ​​thoughts to return to headquarters, restore Riley's sense of self, and save her from her own anxiety.

Well, technically

While Amy Poehler returns with a deeper understanding of her character Joy, the rest of the original emotions don't fare as well.

For starters, we lost two of the voice actors from the original: Bill Hader as Fear and Mindy Kaling as Disgust. They were replaced by Tony Hale and Liza Lapira, respectively, and while both actors were capable enough, so much of the characters' personalities were shaped around their original voice actors that the replacements seemed like flat imitations.

(There are reports that Hader and Kaling backed out of the sequel after being offered $100,000, while Poehler returned at a $5 million salary.)

New emotions are not much more offered; They're there, they're making little jokes, but it's clear that anxiety is the star of the show.

The same feeling of flat imitation is found in the staging. Inside Out 2 swaps direction from Pixar luminary Pete Docter (Up; Soul) for Kelsey Mann, in his first feature film. Even when the plot beats are visually new – like the new characters the gang meets in Riley's Secrets Vault – they rely too conceptually on Docter's original revolutionary eye.

Coming of age

When Inside Out landed in the sweet, innocent days of 2015, much of its power came from how succinctly it communicated very obscure topics: the complicated feelings of growing up and why sadness is necessary. Its high-level plot made sense because the simplicity of children's emotions can be depicted literally.

The mind of a teenager is much more complicated. Anxiety has a wonderfully exhausted character design and Maya Hawke brings him to life with kind, grounded voice work. But lumping the discomfort, nervousness, worry, and fear that make up anxiety into an umbrella term introduces a pathological element that raises more questions than it answers.