Inside Out 2 has the auspicious honour of being the first film released under Pixar's new marketing plan, and it shows.
In May this year, Pixar president Jim Morris confirmed to Bloomberg that every second release from the studio would be a sequel or a spin-off.
The studio that forged its way into legend with films like Toy Story, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo would now be focusing on expanding existing intellectual property.
It's easy to see why this happened.
During the beginning years of the pandemic, Pixar released three original films — Soul, Luca and Turning Red — directly onto its streaming platform. They all have Rotten Tomatoes scores in the 90s and have been critically praised as smart, sensitive stories for children. But they didn't make much money. The final gut punch for Pixar's original stories came in the form of Elemental, which had Pixar's worst opening box office numbers ever, despite the fact it went on to claw in nearly half a billion dollars worldwide.
Meanwhile, nostalgia-reliant sequels like The Incredibles 2 and Finding Dory were pulling in the box office billions.
And that's how we've arrived at Inside Out 2.
Puberty blues
In the acclaimed original Inside Out we were introduced to Riley, a pre-teen with a pre-teen's collection of basic emotions, who also happen to be separate characters here: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger.
Now, Riley is 13 and a lot has changed. She's taller, stinkier and she has a defined Sense of Self, represented literally by a glowing tangle of beliefs that are born from memories.
She's also welcoming a swathe of puberty-induced emotions including Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Anxiety (Maya Hawke).
Worst still, these new mature emotions have chosen to appear the weekend Riley is off to a very important hockey camp with her best friends. During the car ride up, Riley's friends reveal they won't be attending the same high school in the coming year.
All this sets in action a sequence of events that leaves Anxiety in charge, and those OG emotions, along with Riley's Sense of Self, punted to the back of Riley's mind with all the unwanted memories.
Joy and the gang must traverse sar-chasms, imaginariums and a sea of thought to return to Headquarters, restore Riley's Sense of Self and save her from her own Anxiety.
Well, technically
While Amy Poehler returns with a deeper understanding of her character Joy, the rest of the original emotions don't fare as well.
To start with, we've lost two of the voice actors from the original: Bill Hader as fear and Mindy Kaling as disgust. They've been replaced by Tony Hale and Liza Lapira respectively and, while the two actors are capable enough, so much of the characters' personalities were moulded around their original voice actors that the replacements sound like flat imitations.
(There are reports Hader and Kaling bailed on the sequel after being offered $US100k, while Poehler was returning to a $US5 million pay day.)
The new emotions aren't afforded much more; they're there, they make small quips, but it's clear Anxiety is the star of the show.
The same feeling of flat imitation translates to the directing. Inside Out 2 trades the direction of Pixar luminary Pete Docter (Up; Soul) for Kelsey Mann, in his first feature. Even when the plot beats are visually new — like the new characters the gang meets in Riley's Secrets Vault — they lean too hard conceptually on Docter's original, revolutionary eye.
Coming-of-age
When Inside Out landed in the sweet, innocent time of 2015, much of its power came from how succinctly it communicated very cloudy topics: the complicated feelings of growing up, and why sadness is necessary. Its high-concept plot made sense because the simplicity of children's emotions are able to be portrayed literally.
The mind of a teenager is much more complicated. Anxiety has a wonderfully frazzled character design and Maya Hawke brings it to life with kind and grounded voice work. But to lump the discomfort, nerves, worry and dread that make up anxiety into an umbrella term introduces a pathological element that throws up more questions than it answers.
Puberty is such a wildly varying experience and it's hard to explain, which is why the best representations speak to a specific audience.
For instance, Bo Burnham's excruciating Eighth Grade uses warts-and-all realism to help a slightly older teen audience reflect on how disturbing puberty was. Pixar's own triumph, Turning Red, uses fantastical allegory to send a message to younger kids that things are changing and that's fine.
Inside Out 2 can't decide what audience it's trying to reach so it lands on the widest one possible, and that means it doesn't click with puberty as successfully as it did with children's emotions.
There are pops of insight — like when Joy comes to terms with the adverse effects of toxic positivity, or the mantra-like conclusion of only worrying about things in our control — but the solutions to problems are too simplistic, the resolutions too neat, the edges too straight.
And if you're thinking: "It's a kid's film, why are you holding it to such a high standard?" All I can say is, Pixar started it.
In their golden era of the late 90s/early 2000s, Pixar successfully ripped Disney out of the princess and fairytales model to say loud and clear that children deserve thoughtful, complex, original storytelling.
Inside Out 2 is a perfectly serviceable kids' film: it looks good, has a solid enough plot and comedy that won't make adults groan.
But when Pixar has proven time and time again that it is capable of more, we should be demanding it.
Loading YouTube content
Inside Out 2 is in cinemas now.
Posted, updated
