An early draft of this review was originally published on June 20, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
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Ever wish you could just load up your most painful memories and catapult them to the back of your mind?
One of my favorite short stories to read with creative writing students is a disturbing fantasy called “The Hurler,” by the great fiction writer Gina Ochsner, from her book People I Wanted to Be. In it, a girl builds a catapult for “hurling” everything that troubles her over a fence and into a landfill. Before long, she has a line of visitors from all over the neighborhood: People bring her all kinds of things that represent their pain — “promise rings and ticket stubs… bad birthday presents, ID bracelets, framed pictures of the formerly loved.” One even catapults a family member. And by the end of the story, we’re struggling to accept the image of a beating human heart being cut out of a person and launched into the darkness in order to free someone of their heartache. At the beginning of the story, readers are laughing at the humor and whimsy; by halfway through, the laughter becomes more challenging; and by the end a sense of horror has settled over the room.
I don’t know if screenwriters Dave Holstein and Meg LeFauve, or Kelsey Mann (credited here with LeFauve for the story), ever read Ochsner’s story. But the central premise of Inside Out 2 reminds me very much of “The Hurler.”
In this sequel to 2015’s delightful Inside Out, we rejoin Riley (Kensington Tallman) and find her mind still full of quite-literally colorful emotions.
Riley was 11 in Inside Out, and the stress she experienced as her family relocated from Minnesota to San Francisco gave Pixar Animation a chance to develop a wonderland alive with Hashtag “All the Feels.” We watched Joy (Amy Poehler), the captain of Riley’s emotional Enterprise, strive to stabilize Riley through the relocation with the help of her colleagues Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Sadness (Phyllis Smith). As feelings of loss welled up, Joy had to learn the hard way that Sadness, as unpleasant as she might sometimes be, is absolutely essential to a human being’s capacity to process change. Sadness ended up playing a key role in helping Riley be truthful about her struggles, grieve her losses, and ultimately bond with her parents in their own losses, thus increasing their understanding and love, and helping them release their pain to make room for new experience.
Inside Out 2 follows a similar arc, but finds Riley suffering the first quakes of puberty. The basic crew is back at their stations — with a few vocal switch-ups (Hader is replaced by Tony Hale, Kaling by Liza Lapira). And, following Joy’s reckless whims to help Riley develop a flawless “sense of self,” they’re loading up the colorful orbs of Riley’s darkest thoughts and catapulting them to the back of her mind so she doesn’t have to reckon with them. (Hmm. Sound familiar?)But their experiment is interrupted by a wrecking and construction crew who barge in into Headquarters, smash things to pieces, go to work up upgrading Riley’s technology, and set the stage for an influx of new and disruptive emotions: Anxiety (Maya Hawke, who is having a year!), Envy (Ayo Edebiri, who is having a year!), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and Nostalgia (June Squibb, who is, yes, having a year!).
This “remodel” takes place as Riley and her two best friends Grace (Grace Lu) and Bree (Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green) are readying for high school, and Riley’s emotional equilibrium suffers heavy blows when she learns that Grace and Bree are transferring to a different high school. Making things more complicated, Riley decides that she needs to impress the cool kids at her new school. All of these conflicting fears, desires, insecurities, and ambitions play out most dramatically on the ice rink at hockey camp, as Riley strives to make the high school team, deal with peer pressure, and decide whether or not to honor her old friendships at the risk of jeopardizing her reputation.
Riding a rollercoaster of these new emotions, Riley’s moral compass goes haywire. Anxiety and her gang sweep Joy and her team aside, commandeer the upgraded Headquarters, and drive Riley into a vertiginous spiral of emotional distress, which leads to some impulsive, unethical decisions. She’ll lash out in rage at one moment, implode with despair the next, swoon over pop culture heartthrobs, spew lies driven by envy of others, and even stoop to crimes like breaking and entering in order to appease her anxieties. Joy and Company have to address these crises by delving into the depths of Riley’s subconscious, even discovering a Deep Dark Secret.
As this character we care about shocks us with the severity of her behavior, I realized that the Pixar sequel Kelsey Mann’s directorial debut reminds me of most is Monsters University. That, too, was a Pixar sequel that took risks in compromising the integrity of a primary character. But while the storytelling team goes to surprising extremes in upsetting the familiar order and displacing and scattering characters we know and love, we can rightly assume that the disparate pieces will be reconciled in another of Pixar’s typically frenzied finales. And, for the most part, it works. I appreciate where the story ends up. It doesn’t merely endorse “positive thinking” — in fact, it does the opposite of that, forcing Riley to arrive at a truthful but forgiving new “sense of self.”While I don’t think Inside Out 2 is as sublime a cinematic achievement as Toy Story 2, it seems stronger to me than any of the other Pixar sequels so far. We could nitpick about the fact that emotions like envy and anxiety are present in children long before puberty, but let’s cut the storytellers some slack here: The point is obviously that these emotions frequently take on destabilizing influence in teen years, and I don’t think many are likely to argue with that generalization. In a fantasy that anthropomorphizes concepts as subjective and complicated as “fear” and “nostalgia,” we have to agree with the storytellers to treat character definitions rather loosely. (The movie itself acknowledges — and has fun with — some contradictions, allowing Anger to make some level-headed suggestions, and even Embarrassment occasionally stands up straight and tall.)
If I have any serious misgivings about the conclusion, they have to do with accountability. Over the course of Riley’s chemical calamity, we see her committing some serious infractions… infractions that we expect we’ll see reckoned with in some “teachable moments.” Strangely, almost all of those behaviors are brushed aside, forgotten, or… maybe just deleted to bring the movie in at around 90 minutes?Don’t get me wrong — I think it would be simplistic and, worse, moralistic to require the storytellers to punish Riley severely for all of her crimes. I’ve already seen a few critics filing greater grievances than mine, complaining that the movie “lets Riley off” without “holding her accountable.” And I can remember a younger, more moralistic, more judgmental version of myself that would have agreed. But I’ve grown to believe that such legalism does more harm than good — to movies, and to people. Isn’t it a nearly universal human experience that we do not all suffer harsh justice for our teenage crimes in the here and now? I suspect we’ve all committed indiscretions, major or minor, in our teen years that embarrass us and haunt us (like the Deep Dark Secret who lurks in the shadows of Riley’s memory), crimes that were never brought before a court. In healthy human beings, these unresolved issues become burdens of conscience that have a formative influence on us, and we should let storytellers reflect that reality. I’m glad the movie doesn’t tidy things up too nicely. (And anyway, we do see Riley repenting of some sins — and receiving some grace from others. This suggests that such things are possible, even if not all of them are being accounted for in the onscreen narrative.) The storytellers shouldn’t be required to audit Riley’s morality and publish her report card at the end of the film; if they show her finding her way to new and healthy balance — leaning into truthfulness, hope, and love instead of justifying misbehavior for some narrow definition of success — that’s more than enough for me.
Having said that, it does seem like an important scene or two — even just a quick glimpse of some conversations and reconciliations — might be missing at the end. I find it odd that movie focuses so much on one particularly dramatic lapse in judgment — it involves Riley breaking into a coach’s office to read confidential information — and then never brings it up again. Here’s hoping there’s a little more about that in an Extended Edition.
Anyway, just as Riley learns to give herself grace for being imperfect, so I’m happy to grant the movie some grace — because I think the wisdom it does offer us will be incredibly therapeutic for young viewers in navigating storms of change and transition. And I can tell you that it was also therapeutic — and even deeply moving — to two grownups who need to be reminded of the truths Inside Out 2 spotlights.
As we walked through Santa Fe’s Railyard District after the movie, Anne and I talked about how, growing up in Protestant churches, we were both conditioned to constantly check our egos with reminders of how inherently sinful we were. We struggled to understand how, in the languages of the churches we grew up in, we could have a healthy sense of gratitude and joy in who we were and how we were made. That such a severe auditing of our moral character was taught from pulpits and in Sunday schools gave it an extra weight, complicating the encouragement we received from parents and teachers and our capacity to take joy in our successes. When you’re taught that God is making a list and checking it twice for every possible lapse or misbehavior, you might find yourself bending under the pressure of severe authoritarianism.
How could we possibly embrace joy if were constantly aching over our sins — the very sins that Jesus so quickly and completely forgives?
Inside Out 2 never employs any traditionally “religious” vocabulary, but its fundamentals are applicable, I think, within any sphere of human experience. As a teenager in evangelical Christian culture, I could quote chapter and verse to you about my responsibility to love my neighbor. But if I’d seen Inside Out 2 during adolescence, I think I might have had a much stronger understanding of the full standard of that glorious command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” We can’t love our neighbors well if we aren’t practicing love for ourselves. (And yes, there’s a big difference between showing yourself love and endorsing self-indulgence or dismissing accountability for your actions.) Inside Out 2 might have been useful for teenage Jeffrey in impressing upon me the importance of showing myself patience, mercy, and forgiveness over struggles that everyone suffers. It might have helped me when I stumbled to get back up with confidence and hope, and it might have equipped me better to weather the storms of envy, embarrassment, and anxiety that still afflict me — and, I believe, everyone around me — at every turn.
I am delighted to see that Inside Out is blowing up at the box office. Let’s not take our aggravations and disappointments with it and catapult them to the back of our minds; let’s face them and discuss them. But let’s also recognize that this movie is likely to do a lot of good for a lot of people — no matter how old, no matter the nature of their challenges and transitions — for many years to come.