“Inside Out 2” is easily the best movie Pixar has come out with in many years, excluding “Luca.” After a series of failed films, such as “Elemental” and “Lightyear,” “Inside Out 2” is the perfect movie to bring audiences back.
Riley Andersen is now a 13-year-old, she is smart, kind and in the words of Joy, exceptional. After her difficulties moving to San Francisco in the first movie, Joy, with the help of Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust, has a perfect system set up. She takes all of Riley’s positive memories and uses them to create her core beliefs while discarding all the other memories in the back of her mind. After her many trials and tribulations, Riley now has a close friend group with whom she gets invited to hockey camp after catching the eye of the high school hockey coach. However, Riley is a teenager now just beginning to face puberty and all of its new emotions. Due to this change, the new characters in the sequel are Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment and Ennui (a French word meaning boredom.)
After learning her two best friends will be attending a different high school next year, Anxiety decides to reinvent Riley in hopes of impressing her hockey idol Val Ortiz. Anxiety discards Riley’s current sense of self into the back of the mind with the rest of her unpleasant memories and evicts the original emotions. Joy and the others must retrieve her true sense of self before Anxiety completely changes who Riley is as a person.
It is fitting Inside Out 2 came out nine years after the original, allowing the fans to grow with it and be able to enjoy Riley’s new journey with a fresh perspective. Still, the movie is fun for kids, but it is meant for a slightly older audience, and while I did tear up within the first few minutes of the movie, after that it was all laughter. While I don’t believe it outshines the original, “Inside Out 2” introduces more complex emotions and shows the pains of growing up, but does so with humor while still managing to have plenty of emotional moments. I also enjoyed the choice of Anxiety as the main villain, especially with the reconceptualization of Sadness in this film compared to the original. In the end, “Inside Out 2” is not anything groundbreaking, but it serves as a nice reminder that all of our experiences and feelings, good and bad, make us who we are.