Directed by Kelsey Mann, this smooth, streamlined sequel largely focuses on Riley’s nerve-jangling (and strictly PG) interlude at a girls’ hockey camp, an episode that separates her from her parents while bringing her new friends, feelings and choices. (Mann came up with the story with Meg LeFauve, who wrote the screenplay with Dave Holstein.) As in the first movie, the story restlessly shifts between what happens inside Riley’s head and what happens as she navigates the world. Her new emotions find her worrying, grousing, blushing and feigning indifference, and while Joy and the rest of the older emotions are humorously waylaid at times, you can always feel the filmmakers leading Riley toward emotional wellness.
As she struggles with her new emotions, the movie shifts gears ever so carefully. Riley may be a teenager and overwhelmed by novel bodily sensations and feelings, but the people who made this movie tiptoe through this developmental stage like doting parents, ones who aren’t ready to let their girl grow up. To that end, Riley doesn’t get her period, sneak out, develop a crush. She also doesn’t stare at her phone, the camp hockey coach having, in a narratively convenient move, requisitioned the girls’ phones. Riley was a nice, ordinary kid; she still is, and so is everything and everyone else. It turns out that the group hug that she shared with her parents in the first movie wasn’t just sweet; it was also a declaration of Pixar principles.
I imagine that one of the reasons that the filmmakers didn’t give Nostalgia (June Squibb) a larger role here is that it would have been too on the nose for Pixar, a studio that’s conquered the audience — both actual children and inner ones — with its appealing animation and genius for tapping into sentimental longing. For Pixar, every viewer (if especially grown-ups) is a would-be Anton Ego, the unhappy restaurant critic in “Ratatouille,” who, on tasting a delicious dish, flashes back to childhood when his mother tenderly served him the same food. That memory allows Ego to shed his preconceptions so that he can surrender to pleasure as he did once upon a time, much as Pixar insists that you to do while watching its movies.
Franchises often bank on nostalgia, so it’s easy to fall for “Inside Out 2,” which works largely because the first one does wonderfully well. The new movie conforms to the original’s ethos as well as inventive template, its conceit and visual design, so its pleasures are agreeably familiar. Mann tweaks here and there, poking into a few shadowy new corners that never get too dark; he also delivers a dazzling scene in which Anxiety spins out of control, a meltdown that’s conveyed as an image of a rapidly rotating orange whirlpool. It’s a mesmerizing, rightly unsettling graphic expression of intense emotional turmoil, and it shakes up both you and the movie. It’s a perfect example of Pixar’s skill for turning ideas into images, some of which actually manage to slip past the safety of its nice worldview with shocks of the sublime.
Inside Out 2
Rated PG for mild peril and broccoli. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters.
