Crowded House

Film: Inside Out 2
Format: Streaming video from Disney Plus on multiple players.

I wasn’t surprised when Disney decided to produce Inside Out 2. The first movie received a ton of acclaim, including an Oscar, and there were certainly going to be more stories to tell here. And with sequels, the idea is always going to be bigger, better, faster, more. We had five emotions in the first movie, let’s ramp that up. Just like the first superhero movie in a series gives us one villain to fight, the sequels bring in more bad guys. Inside Out 2 does the same by handing us four new emotions to gum up the works.

If you don’t remember the first movie, much of the action takes place in a sort of stylized control center in the brain of a young girl named Riley (Kensington Tallman). Our five initial emotions are Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (new voice Liza Lapira), and Fear (another new voice in Tony Hale). As the film begins, things are normal—Riley is hanging out with friends and playing hockey, just like the first film. And then all becomes chaos as puberty hits. A new control panel is installed and four new emotions arrive to help take control: Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos).

Puberty and the new emotions hit at a critical time in Riley’s life. She is heading off to a hockey skills camp that is lead by the coach of the high school Riley will attend in the fall. It’s on the drive there that she discovers her friends Grace and Bree are going to a different school and they will be separated. Riley is desperate to make the team and to find a way to fit in with the older girls, and if you think that this means the new emotions are going to be a large part of what happens, especially Anxiety, you’ve seen a movie before.

The first film gave us the idea of “islands” of personality that eventually merged into one unified place that served as the personality of Riley. This time, what we have is the goal to create a Sense of Self, something that Joy has been working on, cultivating Riley’s good memories to tell her that she is a good person while simultaneously launching all of her bad memories to the storage area in the back of her brain.

The problems happen when Anxiety, wanting control, launches the cultivated Sense of Self to the back of Riley’s mind and locks up the original five emotions to prevent them from taking over control. Joy leads a break out and decides to lead the others on a journey to recover the Sense of Self and reestablish it, ultimately convincing Sadness to return to the command center to help them out when possible. Naturally, all of the new emotions are running amok, particularly Anxiety, whose choices for how to work things is to force Riley to imagine everything that can go wrong all the time, which creates a new negative and unpleasant Sense of Self.

This is definitely a clever movie, and it contains a lot of the fun stuff from the first film in terms of metaphors for how we think. In need of ideas for the final hockey match of the camp, Anxiety triggers a brainstorm, which includes various-sized ideas falling from the sky in Riley’s brain. When Ennui takes control at one point, she creates a massive Sar-chasm that impedes the group’s progress. It’s clever.

But for me, there are two distinct issues with Inside Out 2. The first is that the new emotions dilute those parts of the story. Where we used to essentially have five “personalities” running the show, we now have nine, and even with the fact that Embarrassment doesn’t actually speak much, it means that we’re going to spend a lot less time with each of them. Joy is still the main character inside Riley’s head, but it’s Sadness who is in many ways the most sympathetic, and we need more time with her. Same with anger, who feels set aside in a lot of respects. As someone who has had teenaged daughters, Anger should have very much been more prominent.

The other issue is one that I’ll probably take some heat for: I don’t honestly care about Riley’s real-world issues. I know that these are the cause of the film and what drives the plot, but I can’t really get that excited about them. I’m invested in the world inside her head because it’s a fascinating and interesting place. The world outside of her head isn’t nearly as interesting, and it feels like we’re spending a lot more time there than we did in the first movie.

Don’t get me wrong--Inside Out 2 is a good movie. It simply feels so diluted from the first one, like that idea of needing to do more for the audience is actually leaving us with a lot less of the things that we want.

I know I’m in the minority on this, and I’m okay with it. Feel free to go after me in the comments—I promise I won’t let Anger or Ennui run the controls when I respond.

Why to watch Inside Out 2: New and more complex emotions.
Why not to watch: More characters means less time with each one.