‘I don’t know how to stop Anxiety. Maybe we can’t...’
I’m genuinely wary of Pixar’s late-era output, especially the sequels. It’s no longer the purveyor of magic that it once was and most of the best animated films of the last decade haven’t come from Pixar—a sorry state of affairs. And so, it was with some hesitation then that I approached Inside Out 2. I was to be pleasantly surprised…
Now that Riley (Kensington Tallman) is a teenager, her previous range of emotions is not enough to express her newfound adolescence. And so, a whole new range of more complicated emotions arise: Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and, most pertinently of all, Anxiety (Maya Hawke). Less interesting than all of these new emotions running around is the subplot around Riley making it into her new high school’s hockey team.
The transition to being a teenager is a rich comic seam to mine and writer-director Kelsey Mann accurately portrays what it is actually like to be a teenager and not just what an adult thinks that it might be like. Mann’s screenplay (co-credited to Meg LeFauve
Dave Holstein) captures the uneasy mixture of intense anxiety and occasional hubris perfectly and the portrayal of Riley’s panic attack in the third act is genuinely breathtaking filmmaking – particularly for children. There are also some smart and witty visual jokes (bottling up the feelings, Riley’s darkest secret being manifested as a monstrous beast, an old-school video game character jerkily walking around spouting questionable epithets – all good stuff) and while the ending feels a little abrupt, Inside Out 2 must be considered a success.
While I would prefer to see Pixar taking a risk on original concepts, Inside Out 2 is their best sequel since Toy Story 3 and their best film outright for a number of years. It’s not the most successful animated film of all time (!) for nothing.
