Limbic capitalism

INSIDE OUT 2

2024

Directed by Kelsey Mann

Written by Meg LeFauve, Dave Holstein, and Kelsey Mann

Spoilers: moderate

I find it hard to believe (though believe it I must, for it's obviously an objective fact) that the filmgoing public had such great optimism for Disney-Pixar's nine-years-later sequel to Inside Out to propel it to such great success.  I guess it shouldn't surprise me, and of course its existence doesn't surprise me: Inside Out was their last original film that was a real cultural touchstone and, thus, all but forced Disney-Pixar's hand to continue it whether or not it had any business being continued, or if they were at all likely to continue it competently.  Some of that could be my own bad attitude: even back in 2015, it felt like the whole universe must have considerably lowered its standards to have declared Inside Out some kind of once-in-a-generation work of animated cinema and/or family film pedagogy.  Not that it was bad; just so clumsy in its "this is a metaphor, oh wait, no, it's not" fantasy world-building, and in that world-building's interface with the brass-tacks requirements of making a Pixar adventure film inside some little girl's brain, that it bounces back and forth, pretty constantly, from poignant to dumb.  The poignant predominates; I'm happy to call it "good."

I'll even give credit where credit's due: Inside Out has a reasonably strong grasp of depression, so as far as its reductive scheme went, it did have something to say about that particular mental state, with the insight that depression is the exile of joy and sadness, and a reversion to a mechanistic state controlled only by fear, anger, and disgust, in its fanciful dramatization of a little girl having an emotional meltdown because she was shipped halfway across the country to a lonely, desolate-feeling city.  So if it had that insight, along with its aligned insight in its revelation that sadness was necessary, because it lets the people who love you know you needed their help, or (as Inside Out doesn't ponder what happens if nobody gives a shit) at least it lets you grieve what you've lost and move on to what's next, then Inside Out 2 is certainly not topping those insights.  At least not with its saga of a little girl going to big girls' hockey camp for a weekend, and possibly not demonstrating such amazing skill that she's going to immediately make the high school team; nor is it doing so with its message about anxiety, which I think sums up to, more-or-less, "I dunno, chill out?"

That's about all we get.  It's very slightly more complicated, but not by much, seemingly rather (ahem) afraid about how far it wants to push its secondary current, that maybe, just maybe, we, mumble mumble, need anxiety or something, to help us not make, like, mistakes and stuff [trails off].  To paraphrase Captain Kirk in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, somehow a more confident movie about feelings, don't we need our pain?  Inside Out 2 doesn't fucking know, why are you even asking?  Because it made 1.6 billion dollars?

That's my prejudice against it coming out: it doesn't exist because of any need or desire to tell an Inside Out story, but as a brand extension (not to mention as a hedge against all of its studio's recent box office failures).  To some degree or another this is true of a great number of movies, it's just Disney properties have gotten exasperatingly bad about hiding this from you while you're watching theirs.  Hence the entirely broken reconception of "emotions" in Inside Out 2, which is plainly driven by a combination of "sequels need to have new characters" and "new characters sell Happy Meals or something" concerns, though I really could've lived without the movie unaccountably rubbing our faces in how it's already precluded its new characters' existence, when it revisits the skull-bound control rooms in our little girl's parents' heads.  As we previously saw in the last movie, those new characters weren't there, and that's a retcon, fine, but—as they have not yet been introduced in this movie—they still are not here now.  (The main "antagonistic" emotion finally shows up for each parent for a very late-coming gag, re-running the same bad "70s sitcom gender essentialist" comedy we had last time; but it does pretty much seal in iron the idea that the new emotions are wholly functionless villains.)

Anyway, I should stop talking around it, so: a year after Inside Out, our protagonists' human host Riley is now thirteen (also now played by Kensington Tallman), and she's in her last year of middle school, and was looking forward to high school, but a wrench has been thrown into the works when both her best friends admit that they're going to a different high school on their way to a hockey camp held by Riley's high school's hockey coach.  That makes this weekend very important to Riley—she wants on that team so bad—and more of a lark for them.  This is not the dramatic conflict; it's more about how Riley, reasonably enough, spends more time ingratiating herself to the older girls in ways that demonstrate these are some of the nicest and most generous teens in history, given they allow Riley every opportunity to do so, despite all of her efforts being irritating and on-their-face phony.  Nonetheless, prioritizing her new peer group for a weekend, that's our drama, this conflict being presented as Riley betraying both her friends and her own self-image as a good person, if only at what I'd have to imagine must be the most utterly milquetoast level that a "betrayal" could exist at all, and still be faintly recognizable as one.  Worse, and I don't know why I'm dwelling on the details of a scenario that screams "oh, sure, that's good enough," this is the exact moment that Riley has entered PUBERTY, as heralded by the massive alarm klaxon that wakes up all her emotions in the middle of the night, whom we've already been reintroduced to by an obnoxiously old-fashioned "remember us?" sequence that, bless it, wants to lend a helping hand to some purely-notional child whose parents forgot to screen the first Inside Out for them before hauling them out to see this one.  Those emotions, as you know and as I basically already mentioned, are Joy (Amy Poehler), still effectively leading the team with her forced positivity tyranny but moderated somewhat by what she learned in the last film; Sadness (Phyllis Smith); Anger (Lewis Black); Fear (Tony Hale); and Disgust (Liza Lapira).

Of course PUBERTY doesn't work that way, but to prove I'm not a stick-in-the-mud asshole who does, in fact, understand that this is a cartoon, I think this is perfectly fine.  But puberty brings in a whole new team: Anxiety (Maya Hawke), their leader, along with Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopolous), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser, whom I'm not sure has a double-digit number of lines even including his embarrassed meeps, but we'll get to all this later).  Soon enough, Anxiety has thrown out the whole original group, so that the plot of Inside Out can be repeated, and I mean it really is basically the same thing, to a weird-feeling degree: the difference is that Joy and Sadness and the rest have to trek back across frequently over-literalized brain country to retake their positions in Riley's command center lest she have (another, somewhat different kind of) breakdown, except last time Riley's breakdown felt deeply sympathetic and this time Riley's breakdown and lead-up to her breakdown make her seem like an unlikable maniac.  "Remember that time Riley faked a panic attack to manipulate us into forgiving her?"—says her friends' version of Nostalgia, a cameoing emotion (June Squibb).

This is maybe the least substantive of my complaints, so I'll try to be brief about the new characters' design as cartoons, but they're not very good (beyond, anyhow, the basic Inside Out aesthetic of "glowing little bead clouds," which is still fairly neat, though it's not really worth discussing Inside Out 2 as a work of animation versus Inside Out; it feels in every essential like the exact same technology and technique made it, like it could've been sitting around since 2016, even).  But Nostalgia is a good exemplar for how I feel about this whole movie.  She's just... an old woman.  She's not an ambulatory hybrid of Joy and Sadness, which is how one might depict "nostalgia" as a concept, if one spent even three seconds considering it.  She's so straightforward a visual joke that I barely detect the "joke" there.  She is lazy.  (They send her away, all nine emotions agreeing it's not her time—because a teenager can't feel nostalgia?  RILEY FELT NOSTALGIA IN THE PREVIOUS FILM.)  The antagonists are better but only on average: Embarrassment's winning no design awards (big blush-pink guy in a hoodie who hides his face), but he's at home enough in a universe where Anger is a shouty little businessguy made of red fire; Anxiety, a frazzled ugly orange muppet type of thing with french fries for hair, is good for what they want to do with her, cartooning-wise, but something doesn't feel flawlessly apt there for "the Anxiety of a thirteen year old girl, specifically"; Ennui, or "Boredom" as the film helpfully explains (they are not the same thing, that's why they're different words), might be the best design in the whole nonet, a remarkably angular creation prone to lounging in showy ways, and I'd love her if anyone had any thoughts about Ennui beyond deploying Exarchopolous as a dreadfully dull national stereotype.  (Hand to God, she says "ooh-la-la.")  And to wedge it in somewhere, this movie just does not have material or space enough for nine or ten actors; Anger and Black and Sadness and Smith are, amongst others, nearly lost in the shuffle.  But then there's Envy: she drags that average way down, a teal bug-eyed babydoll that you'd never know is "envy" if she didn't identify herself as such, and which you might forget anyway, since nobody whatsoever involved with her seems to have any idea what envy is, or at least how to depict it, and rather than the self-loathing wish to live inside someone else's skin, they've imagined it instead as just childlike desire, more like hunger for a snack or an interest in shiny keys.*

So that brings us to the conceptual objections, or further conceptual objections, and the movie is just a feature-length conceptual objection with very little countervailing it like was at least present in the feature-length conceptual objection of the first film.  I'll say I kind of wish I'd seen it in a theater anyway, because watching it as I did—on my couch with my spouse, allowing us each to make our conceptual objections in real-time—is not a conducive way to watch Inside Out 2, and perhaps not even a fair one.  But damned if it didn't confirm my doubts about it.  One reason I hoped they wouldn't even make an Inside Out 2 is that I knew they couldn't really continue the first film across the threshold into young adulthood, that they would be too petrified and squicked to do "emotions in the head of a thirteen year old girl" justice, and I was right, though I'm maybe surprised how diligently they contrived a scenario where they wouldn't have to even try—I can guarantee that "it's about a hockey camp, I guess" is a lot more because a girl's hockey camp meant they could absolutely gender segregate their story than because Riley canonically loves hockey.**  And that's Disney, and our culture, so whatever, but it's not really possible to accept this as even marginally-tethered to real psychology: as anybody who was ever a human child (presumably the majority of the audience for this movie; hopefully its makers) knows, and perhaps knows too well, anxiety, boredom, embarrassment, and envy are all things that even the littlest children feel.

It also disregards the first Inside Out, which was, besides its more specific lessons about depression/sadness, already about how adulthood ushers in a whole manifold constellation of new emotions, but all based on the original five in infinite combinations.  You may approve of its taxonomy of the human soul or you may not, but that was its premise; now it's monsters from the id, or something, crawling up to take over, which is much harder to buy than Inside Out's original omissions or misconceptions, because we all know that fear and anxiety are essentially the same fucking thing and the movie knows this too, because Fear automatically respects Anxiety, talks about how smart Anxiety is, and both characters, to the extent they get to do anything amidst the clutter, are all about imagining perils and making plans to mitigate those perils.  The script offers a very hair-splitting explanation, about physical dangers and social ones.  Whatever.  You can go down the list with this: Embarrassment is Disgust and/or Anger turned inward; Ennui is basically just Sadness (or depression) again, perhaps alloyed with Anger; Envy is the newest, but is still probably Joy and Anger, insofar as one thing Inside Out 2 kind of helped me crack is the mystery of missing want, and that Joy is basically Desire, that is, if they'd felt comfortable having an emotion inside a little girl's head called "Desire."  Altogether, it makes me annoyed that they didn't build on Inside Out's ideas at all, not in any interesting or meaningful sense, because it was right there.  If you wanted new emotions—and I get that, of course you do—then they should arise out of the old ones, maybe with a dollop of horror.  Fear, gone mad with mutinous hormones, is now Anxiety—and please, by all means, still cast Hawke, who's the only voice actor who really seems like she can pretend to parse any of this gobbledygook on behalf of her character's legitimate fears and worries (chip off the old block, I guess).  That might include Poehler, who's at least still present in her overbearing character, but it's not like we expect Joy to advance much, despite a big whiney speech.

The same basic problem accrues to the de rigeur, let's-just-do-the-last-movie-again adventure, which doesn't really ever seek to ask if a pubescent girl's mindscape ought to be more-or-less the same candy-colored kid's shit it was last time, or if we should maybe see some shift in the carnivalesque aesthetic now that we're growing up (if anything, the settings probably wind up with Inside Out 2 having more rainbow puke flavor).  Meanwhile, the sequel stumbles into even more conceptual crevasses than its predecessor, regarding how literally we need to take the imagery we're seeing—crevasses, I said, but I mean "sar-chasms."  Riley's newfound adolescent sarcasm (small children are not sarcastic?) opens up a chasm inside her brain, and, as Disgust points out, this is one belligerently stupid joke.  Well, you wrote the joke.  If you don't like it, write another one.  Even so, the most conceptually broken bit involves the line (proudly advertised in the trailer!) where Fear saves them from a fall, and remarks, "The real question is why you all don't have one!", meaning his parachute.  I mean, no, man.  The real question is, "why, what fucking happens if they did plummet from the 'sky' at high 'velocity' into the 'ground'?  Would Riley's Joy, Sadness, Anger, and Disgust then die, is that what you're implying?"  It's rickety enough just when we have to accept that the mindscape possesses geography, which is at least metaphorical enough to play; but a lot of Inside Out 2 is, albeit more quietly, as bad as when Inside Out loudly deployed its "bridge made of imaginary boy clones" as an important third act plot device.

Now, I'm obviously down on it, but it's not unwatchably terrible.  For one thing, it has an improving trajectory as it goes on, which always helps even if it's still at a pretty flat angle.  There's a reasonably great Ridley Scott Apple commercial scene with Anxiety coming into her own as the evil overlord of a brain bureaucracy; the finale's dubious, but it does have Anxiety, worked up to a fever pitch and transformed into something akin to the Flash, in order to "fix" Riley's situation by only making it worse.  It gives us the one really masterpiece-level piece of character animation here, with some very limited eye movements that are the most piquant thing the film ever gets up to.  (But then, "truly great character animation" is hardly going to be available to Inside Out 2, not even that ironically: the characters are either going to be overwrought expressions of their stereotype, or leave you wondering why they're not conforming to their stereotype.)  Most of the comedy it gets up to is bad, but I did enjoy the emotions finding themselves locked away in the repression vault with the suppressed pieces of "uncool" pop culture that Riley likes, notably an old children's show she still secretly loves that appears to have been animated on, like, freaking twenty-fours.

And as much as I've bitched and moaned about its story, at no time does it feel like what a lot of Disney products can feel like (including at Pixar, at least with Lightyear and Elemental), a barely-coherent collection of studio notes covering up the joins between a hundred screenplay drafts.  It feels like it was written in one go; but it's so lazy about that that I don't know if it's better or worse that it also feels like it was written in one afternoon.

Score: 5/10

*Though if we're discussing character design more generally, let's say that it's nice they gave Riley acne, but it's less nice that her acne textures are the same pimples when we see her what must be months later.

**I mean, the movie (barely) allows you to suppose Riley has a crush on the high school hockey team's captain, which would surely be healthier than what it textually is, a lame parasocial obsession with a high school hockey player.