Inside Out 2 Movie Review: Less creative but equally insightful, the sequel brings new emotions to Riley's mind
There is a lot of Anxiety in Inside Out 2. For Pixar, this release is proving to be a watershed moment that could alter the studio's future. For fans of the original, probably the last great original classic from the house, there is a risk of something less than expected. And for Riley — the girl whose mind serves as the stage for the adventures of Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust and who is now entering the dreaded adolescence — this is the main new emotion.
Ansiedade appears in her head shortly after the puberty alarm, installed at the end of the first film, goes off in full force. She is accompanied by Envy, Shame, and Boredom and serves not only as an antagonist and agent of chaos for the quintet that, until then, totally controls Riley's heart, but even as a rhythm for the entire story. Last week, the director of photography for Inside Out 2 said that Pixar looked to Uncut Gems — a film I've described as the best representation of life in the 21st Century because of its anxious nature — when it came to crafting an unsettling experience. Given the due proportions, the comparison has merits.
Director Kelsey Mann, replacing the irreplaceable Pete Docter, is more than willing to make us uncomfortable as she narrates Riley's first steps into her new phase. Now the star player on her hockey team, she experiences a whirlwind of emotions (literally) when she is called to train with her high school team and, at the same time, discovers that her best friends are changing schools. Overnight, her life is once again thrown into a sea of uncertainty. If Docter's film identified in the emotional simplicity of a child's immediate reactions to moving to a new city the way to approach the mix of feelings that we all face in life, Mann's film tries to address the complexities of those who begin to learn what processes like these never end.
For Riley as a child, there was only the Sadness of the lost past. At age 13, Riley begins to worry about what she might lose in the future. Enter Anxiety. There's not much at stake in Inside Out 2 (no event here is as sad as Bing-Bong's death or as heartbreaking as the erasure of Riley's face on the bus), but Mann rightly understands that when we feel anxious, any situation can be the end of the world. This, of course, is heightened in a teenager. In one of the film's first clever moves, we see how each of the old emotions becomes stronger as Riley goes through her hormonal explosion, and when the new quartet enters the scene, the intensity reaches another level.
In practice, just as Alegria and Sadness were the only well-crafted characters in the original, only Joy and Ansiedade have any relevance in the sequel (I think that, in English, Ayo Edeberi should help Enveja to stand out), and that is not the only similarity between the two films. For much of its duration, Inside Out 2 is content to repeat the model of the previous one, including in the format of its narrative, once again centered on a group of emotions that need to find their way back to the girl's Control Center before she does something you will regret.
It's somewhat inevitable given the shape of the world, but the format becomes repetitive even though Mann and the animators manage to infuse a lot of creativity into the visuals (Pixar has never been as comfortable straying from 3D as they are here) and into the conceptualization of Riley's interior. There are laugh-out-loud figures like an animated Pochete (you'll understand) and environments filled with curious inventions like the vault of secrets, but our second tour inside Riley's head reveals a constant search for something as memorable, funny, and meaningful as Bing-Bong and the Land of Imagination were in the previous feature. There's no shortage of ideas — some, like Lance Slashblade, a cheap copy of Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII, are great — but the application of most of them to the film's logic has less to say.
Bing-Bong disappearing, in the original, represented the painful end of a time when we imagined more. It's a profoundly powerful combination of a concept and meaning absent from most of Inside Out 2, with one important exception that brings the film to its wonderful conclusion. Right at the beginning, we are introduced to Riley's roots, a series of beliefs that the young woman has about herself. These are the conclusions she has drawn based on the emotions that color each of her memories, and when Anxiety takes control, her first decision is to uproot it all to plant new seeds.
With the excuse of wanting the best for her, after all, planning is never too much, Anxiety represents the imbalance that comes when we let our emotions take over us without reservations. This leaves the final stretch of Inside Out 2 genuinely unnerving, a testament to Mann's work not only with emotions but with Riley herself, for whom we care a lot. That's why she manages to end her work with two proposals whose sensitivity rivals the unforgettable appearance of the two-color memory from the 2015 film. Just as Docter brought us to tears by putting on screen the truth that a moment can be, at the same time, happy and sad, Kelsey Mann raises two equally mature and moving discoveries.
The first is that certain certainties (“I'm a great friend,” “I'm a nice person”) that were harmless in childhood risk becoming insufficient, or even arrogant, when we enter a phase that requires more maturity in relationships, including admitting our defects. The second, and perhaps the most important for an eventual third film (very likely given Disney's priorities), is that at a certain point in our lives, we need to stop being led by our emotions and start searching for them, or managing them. them actively. This observation equates (or submits) Alegria to Riley, and shows Inside Out's interest in going beyond a collection of cute characters, to offering a playful but deep analysis of the human being.