“Inside Out 2” comes out to pick up from the first movie after nine years. “Inside Out 2” brings the audience back to Riley and her emotions who are now on the cusp of highschool. However Riley starts to go through puberty as every teenager does and the emotions are joined by four more new emotions, Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui. The movie takes place over the time Riley has at the hockey camp, where she and the emotions will have to navigate through worries about highschool, friendship struggles, and personal growth. Riley undergoes internal struggles as the emotions create turmoil with each other and external struggles when Riley’s relationship with her best friends Bree and Grace becomes shaky. The film ultimately leads to a personal growth within Riley and her emotions along with a heartfelt exploration of the journey to self discovery.
“Inside Out 2” continues to build upon the strong ideas of the first film but also adds new concepts into its world. The conclusion of the first movie continues on and is shown in the second where all the emotions contribute to Riley’s growth which can be seen with the various colored memory orbs shown throughout the movie. Along with the new emotions, the movie introduces the audience to a new concept which is Riley’s belief system, carefully created by Joy and the other emotions.
One of the strongest points of the movie is its creative way to portray its world both visually and auditory. This is shown through ideas like the Stream of Consciousness, The Thought Dump, and the Puberty Alarm. However the most creative and compelling example to me is The Belief System. The emotions created The Belief system by planting the memories that will be the foundation for Riley and lead to beliefs she will manifest. Simply put, The Belief System explains how personal experiences (colored memories) create beliefs (the strands created from those memories) in order to create a personal identity. However the movie creatively depicts that abstract concept by visually depicting The Belief System as a giant tree and auditorily portrays it by telling Riley’s beliefs when one of the belief strands are strummed. This ultimately brings beauty to the process of creating one’s identity.
The general topic the film deals with is puberty and the movie masterfully illustrates what type of moment in life is puberty and what emotions people go through during that period. “Inside Out” takes place during Riley’s childhood where Joy is the dominant emotion while in “Inside Out 2” Anxiety is the dominant emotion. This shows how Pixar interprets childhood being a time of joy in life while puberty being a time of anxiety. Puberty is the stage in life where one creates their self identity and learns about themselves which the movie portrays very interestingly and real. During the movie, Riley tries to reject her past self in order to fit in with the older students and conform to them. She denies liking her favorite band or pretending to like eating a snack that one of the upperclassmen gave her and is overly obsessed on how others view her, conveying an embarrassing yet real puberty experience.
The most emotional and strongest scene of the movie is at the end where Riley is reflecting on herself in the penalty box and comes to the realization of how she views herself instead of how others view her, which is the core of this movie. The format of the movie adds on to this as well. Both the start and the end of the movie are about hockey. In the beginning when Riley is sent to the penalty box she reflects on all the happy memories she has made. However, when she is sent to the penalty box at the end part of the movie instead of happy memories, Riley is met with a wave of complex emotions that lead to her to reflect on her self identity and who she is as a person. The movie compares the two reflections in the penalty box to show how Riley’s thoughts have changed over that time giving the story an interesting layer of depth to it. Additionally, the movie structures the plot in a way that the story of Riley and the story of the emotions meet and overlap with each other. The conflict between the new emotions and old emotions match with the wedge between Riley and her best friends’ relationship while the relationship between Joy and Anxiety ends up overlapping with Riley and Val’s relationship.
Although this movie is great it doesn’t stop it from coming with its downsides. The downsides of the movie is its failure to keep its concept fresh compared to the first and the lack of charming new characters that can fill the void left by the characters in the first movie like Bing Bong. Still, I liked the choice to not complex Val’s character as it contributes to the movie more; since it is more important on how Riley thinks Val views her instead of who Val really is. Overall, “Inside Out 2” is a great movie about the puberty experience, and I can see any person having a great time watching it. If I had to pick specific people though I would recommend it to any parents or teenagers as I feel they will relate to this movie more.
Inside Out 2
Comedy/Family/Animation
96 Minutes
2024
Director
Kelsey Mann
Cast
Amy Poehler as Joy
Maya Hawke as Anxiety
Kensington Tallman as Riley
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