‘Inside Out 2’ Is Both a Major Comeback and a Bad Omen for the State of Pixar

Pixar is back! Again! While the computer-animation institution once boasted a spotless track record of critically acclaimed box office smashes, in the last decade they’ve demonstrated something perhaps more valuable from a company-culture standpoint: Resilience. The Good Dinosaur underperformed the same year that Inside Out became one of their biggest original hits. Lightyear drew scorn and uncharacteristically indifferent audiences with the usually-bulletproof Toy Story brand, but the upcoming Toy Story 5 will almost certainly do and be better. Hell, Elemental mounted its own comeback last summer, when it followed a soft opening with good word-of-mouth from families and an eventual half a billion in global grosses. A small opening won’t be a problem for Inside Out 2, which was just released to typically positive reviews and the biggest box office opening weekend of the year so far.

It’s especially striking to watch Inside Out 2 during the summer of IF and The Garfield Movie. The former is a dopey paean to the magic of imagination that condescends its way through nonsensical solutions for real-world problems, while the latter is a pure merchandising play that grafts very middle-aged-screenwriter daddy issues onto the famous comic-strip cat. Inside Out 2, meanwhile, continues its predecessor’s mission to actually potentially help children figure out how to process their complicated emotions. It sounds like a lofty, puffed-up goal for a Disney sequel, but the original Inside Out pulled it off, taking place inside the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley, where Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader, replaced in the sequel by Tony Hale), Disgust (then Mindy Kaling, now Liza Lapira), and Anger (Lewis Black) work under the supervision of Joy (Amy Poehler) to keep Riley running smoothly. The complexities of our daily mental calculations added up to a simple, powerful idea about the necessity of sadness in a child’s development – one that left plenty of parents and ex-children alike quietly suppressing sobs.

Inside Out 2 is more complicated because Riley is, too – offering a new avenue for Pixar’s typically parent-and-child-centric material. The onset of Riley’s adolescence requires the unexpected (by Joy, anyway) introduction of new emotion-people, led by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), also including Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser). Joy, having mostly learned her less in the previous movie, is willing to work with them, at least to some degree, but Anxiety overpowers the original emotions, suppressing them so she can rule Riley’s head. At risk is a newly literalized concept: Riley’s sense of self, which Joy has been carefully curating as certain key memories (all positive, per Joy’s mandate) codify into beliefs. Joy again needs to learn to let go of her parent-style compulsion to make things as happy and positive as possible for “her” kid, while Anxiety needs to find a less manic way of “helping,” as a confluence of bad news and an intense weekend at hokey camp get Riley spiraling. You may not be surprised to learn that at one point, she has a panic attack.

The first Inside Out burned through a lot of terrific, inventive ideas that zig-zagged between instructive metaphor and top-tier gag work, and Inside Out 2 has to work a little harder to find new corners of Riley’s psyche to uncover. Its biggest victory comes early, when the original emotions are trapped in Riley’s “vault” alongside buried secrets like her abiding affection for a Dora the Explorer-style preschool TV show and a crush on a videogame character. (My eight-year-old was laughing in delight and, I think, recognition.) The filmmakers, led by director Kelsey Mann and returning screenwriter Meg LeFauve, playfully tinker with different animation styles, and come up with some clever twists, like way Anxiety takes over a corner of Riley’s imagination, setting workers with the task of dreaming up the most creatively ridiculous what-if scenarios for her to panic over.

So, Inside Out 2 is an entertaining and funny movie that might actually give kids some extra tools for self-understanding. Another solid job from Pixar. Yet there’s also something a little unsettling about the movie, especially when juxtaposed against the recent report from Bloomberg, focusing on the company’s latest comeback. The article mentions that after the softer-than-expected openings for Lightyear and Elemental (and, it seems, the peak-pandemic direct-to-Disney+ route taken for Turning Red, Luca, and Soul, though that’s an entirely different thing), “executives hosted postmortems to determine how to revitalize the studio… they arrived at mentoring Pixar’s upcoming directors to focus less on autobiographical tales.” Instead, they should “develop concepts with clear mass appeal, many of which—in the case of sequels and spinoffs—had already been proven.”

Those quotes come directly from the article, not Pixar execs themselves. But no one at the company has disputed that this more or less represents the company’s direction. To be fair, Pixar has been alternating sequels and originals for 15 years at this point, and sometimes the vagaries of development means a temporary shift in balance – as in 2016-2019, where the company released three sequels and only one original;  or 2020-2023, where the company put out five originals and just a single spinoff. The issue is less the ratio, which tends to even out, than the focus-groupiness evident in their newest regrouping, and already visible during Inside Out 2. As solid as the new movie is, it also sometimes feels like a group of engineers excitedly showing off their latest metaphysical hack – the Pixar Method of self-realization, conveyed through a colorful seminar. If audiences don’t feel themselves swept away by the emotion of the new movie, maybe it’s because Riley’s emotions feel awfully schematic for the roiling inconsistencies of newfound adolescence.

The movie does nod toward the unpredictability of teenage worries and decisions, and the messiness Joy needs to allow into Riley’s developing sense of self. But its immediate solutions feel awfully instructive: Riley has that textbook panic attack and the movie essentially resolves through a meditation exercise that no one has actually taught her. Compare this with Pixar’s Turning Red, the cartoon about an Asian-Canadian girl who discovers that stress, excitement, or any other extreme emotions can cause her to transform into a giant red panda, a charged and culturally specific vision of Hulking out. It’s one of these scary “autobiographical” movies that seems to have inspired degree of soul-searching over… what? That it didn’t somehow make a billion dollars from its Academy-qualifying theatrical run and Disney+ release? That movie also centers the experience of an adolescent girl around Riley’s age, and while of course there’s always room for more stories about girls (especially at the historically male-centric Pixar), it’s also telling just how much funnier, weirder, and more vital this story is, as opposed to the TED Talk tone that sometimes creeps into Inside Out 2. Both movies have the obligatory emotional conflict and reassuring happy ending, but Turning Red has a time period, style, and unruliness all its own, without sacrificing any of that Pixar-brand mass appeal.

In other words, Turning Red and the original Inside Out do what the best Pixar features do: Take the technical feats of computer animation and all-ages storytelling, and turn them into magic tricks that somehow draw out the universal emotions the company claims to be chasing. Inside Out 2 is fine, and might well be the best mainstream American family film of the summer. But there’s not much ineffable magic; it’s hard to make a movie about the inherent volatility and fragility of growing up that’s also as regimented and orderly as a boardroom-approved sequel.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.