Inside Out 2 (2024) | Film Review

Hi there, remember me? Your Pixar aficionado that usually writes these reviews for movies on Father’s Day weekend when the latest installment of wonder and awe is slated to drop to wow us. It’s been a bit of a rough patch. Much like a teenager transitioning into what truly makes them who they are, Pixar has been stumbling a bit as of late. Onward, Soul, Luca, Elemental where they each brought us decent enough films, none of them had that thing, that core belief that made a Pixar movie what it is. Happy to say that the team has finally found their way back to what makes this weekend the reason Pixar has owned it for so long with Inside Out 2.

It has been nine years since Inside Out and our last visit to the mind of Riley voiced by Kensington Tallman and her emotional pals Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Tony Hale), Anger (Lewis Black) and Disgust (Liza Lapira). This was a brilliant move by Pixar (and Disney) to allow enough time to pass for the kids that saw these movies when they were 5-7 years old to now be 14-16 so that they could best resonate with Riley as she enters that dreaded state of puberty. It also gave their parents enough time to truly understand all the ups and downs and mood swings their kids went through so that they could also relate with this latest mind blowing adventure. This gap of time truly paid off as both of my kids could 100% relate their high school experiences to what Riley was feeling throughout the picture as she transitions from middle school to high school.

As that transition happens to Riley at the ripe old age of 13, puberty sets in and we are introduced to a whole new range of emotions and our new star Anxiety voiced by Maya Hawke. Anxiety brings along the “E-team” in the emotions of Envy, Embarrassment and Ennui, voiced by Ayo Edebiri, Paul Walter Hauser and Adèle Exarchopoulos. They take over the console as Riley, coming fresh off her recreation league’s hockey tournament win, is invited by the future High School coach to participate in a weekend camp with other hockey players from the area. She attends with her two best friends that are her entire world, until she discovers that the two of them will be at one high school, separated from Riley. Anxiety uses this to guide Riley to make new friends with her future potential High School teammates, ditching her old friends even though they agreed to treat the weekend as a chance to play together one last time.

The story is a beautifully woven tale about how we have very simple emotions as a child, and we do things in our brains to protect ourselves in order to form a core belief of who we are. But as we age that core belief is ever changing based on our experiences and Anxiety is a key component of how that core belief is shaped. Anxiety in the movie chucks Riley’s core belief to the back of her mind so that she will forget it while Anxiety forges a new one. Now at the controls, Anxiety sends Joy and the others packing, setting up our hero’s journey for the original five emotions to travel Riley’s evolving mind to retrieve the core belief before Anxiety and the “E-team” ruin Riley’s life forever.

Overall, the mind journey was not as adventurous as the first movie even leveraging some weird forgotten memories that add some humor but seem out of place for Pixar, but the very well timed and placed Dad jokes worked for me and my kids marking this as a great Father’s Day weekend flick. My kids, who are older now, weren’t in for the whimsical adventure. Their focus was much more on how Anxiety tricks our brains, even using parts of it against us to make up things that just aren’t real out of fear of what could go wrong.

In the end Inside Out 2 shines in the score and witty zingers keeping the movie engaging and paced properly. With clever additions such as the stream of consciousness and brainstorms this adventure is kept lighter and fluffier. Thank heavens because losing that purple elephant the first time around… boy howdy was that rough. Interestingly, my wife resonated more with this one than the first and that I think is why Pixar finally is back. If the adults connect just as much as the kids, the Pixar magic has done its mojo. That is the deep dark secret behind Pixar and I am so glad they finally weren’t afraid to let it out of the vault for the world to see once again. When your childlike self and grown-up self-unite, our core belief understands that we are going to be ok, because anything is possible.