My children grew up with Pixar and they carry with them the natural love we have for the things we cherished when young. But it’s not as if taking my daughters to Pixar movies was some kind of penance. Between 1999 when my first daughter was born and 2010, Pixar produced one of the greatest and most consistent decades of film production ever seen. Their worst movie in that timeframe (Cars) is still a fairly good children’s film. And out of the nine movies they released over that time, I count six undeniable classics and a seventh you could make a strong case for. That’s amazing.
Pixar’s formula, if you can call it that, was to produce kid-friendly movies with surprisingly adult appeal. If Cars is the weak link in that list, it’s also the only movie in that decade span that really doesn’t work for adults. But putting it this way is misleading because it suggests that Pixar was making movies using some marketing formula and nothing could be further from the truth. The reason Pixar movies were appealing to adults is that they had great stories, serious themes and good characters. They were, in other words, good movies. The best content for children always, always, always delivers these things.
Since 2011, Pixar hasn’t been the same. Too many sequels. Too many kids-only movies. Too many movies lacking great stories (especially). From 2012 to 2024, only Coco and Inside Out are outstanding movies and many of their other releases are pedestrian. Except for those two stand-outs, only Toy Story 4 is better than Cars, the worst movie from that golden decade. And while Toy Story 4 is a solid movie, it should never have been made. It ruins the single greatest ending for any movie trilogy ever.
So, I went into Inside Out 2 with some mixed expectations. The first movie could easily have been produced during the golden decade. Incredibly original, thought-provoking, with a solid story and an absolutely unique viewpoint, Inside Out also did something that Pixar specializes in — using their oeuvre to tell stories that couldn’t be done any other way. It even had a remarkably simple yet evocative score from Michael Giachinno that I think most of us could recognize in about three notes. The cartoon equivalent of holey (that’s intentional) minimalism. Yet few of Pixar’s recent sequels have lived up to their predecessors. Cars 2 and Cars 3, Incredibles 2 and Finding Dory were all markedly inferior to the originals.
So, here’s the good news. Inside Out 2 is not.
It’s very good.
It’s got some problems. It’s plagued by some of the story confusions that have bedeviled Pixar in the last ten years. But it tells a good story, it has good characters, it has serious themes that it explores lightly but well, and it uses animation — if not quite as imaginatively as the original — in some ways that are also better. It could have been a great movie. All the elements are there with some small changes to the basic story.
Inside Out had one simple story — to grow up we must integrate sadness into our self. We, literally, cannot be all child’s play. That message resonates through every aspect of Inside Out. It’s told in Riley’s story. It’s told in the twin stories of Joy and Sadness. Heck, it’s told in Giachinno’s score that takes those two themes and somehow makes a richer, deeper conclusion.
Inside Out 2 does something very clever. It flips the story from the original. It reminds us that if we cannot grow up at all without sadness, we cannot grow up well without joy. In the movie, as Riley hits puberty, a whole new control console is moved into her brain along with a whole new set of emotions. They are all good for some laughs, but the story is built (in a way suitable to our time) around anxiety. It is Anxiety who rather quickly takes over as the driver of Riley’s actions, banishing not just Joy but all of her original emotions (Anger, Disgust, Sadness, and Fear) to the subconscious vault while she rules the day. Riley, stripped of everything but worry, becomes fixated on guaranteeing her social position in life by making the High School Hockey team. Along the way, she abandons her friends, breaks into the coach’s office to find out how she’s been scored, postures desperately to be part of her new group, and, in general, becomes a driven, miserable person.
That’s a pretty good story. Are parts slightly overdone? Sure. Riley’s break with her friends could have been done more subtly with more impact and truth. But Inside Out 2 captures the enormous burden of expectation we’ve placed on children (and not just children) and the terrible costs that come with it.
But in terms of execution, Pixar messes up significant parts. Pixar isn’t content to have Joy banished and eventually restored. The movie doesn’t want to just teach a lesson about joy, it wants to teach Joy another lesson. In this case, that Joy’s discarding of all Riley’s not great memories has left her personal identity vulnerable. Well…okay. But since when does joy cause us to lose bad memories? Heck, even that might be a good story, but it’s one story too many in the movie and it’s a story that doesn’t really work. It isn’t beautifully symmetrical with the first movie. And, frankly, it’s not necessary. When you burden a great story with a not-great story, you make a movie worse.
Nor does the middle of the movie (which bogs down a bit) make much sense. How could anxiety banish anger, fear and disgust from a teenage mind? Joy? Sure. But Pixar wanted to keep the main characters from the last movie together for the hero’s journey. That’s a bad call since it destroys the plausibility of the scenario. It would have worked better if Anxiety were, at first, embraced by the others (or at least Anger and Fear) who gradually become marginalized as Riley grows so anxious that everything else gets stunted. And instead of Anxiety actively banishing Joy, why not have Joy just get pushed further and further into the background until she is accidentally sucked out of the fore-mind by some memory going to vault? That would have made a lot more sense and would have been a more plausible representation of how we lose the joy in our life.
You may think this is nitpicking for a children’s movie, but the genius of great Pixar movies is they take their story with adult seriousness. Inside Out 2 does that, but it doesn’t do it as well as it could have.
Still, if the mid-movie is a bit of a muddle, Inside Out 2 re-discovers its real story in the last 20 minutes. Riley, driven by and increasingly drowning in anxiety, finds her last, critical, hockey game turning into a nightmare. She’s worked so hard and it’s all worse than when she started. Until, that is, Joy re-captures the console from a bitterly disappointed Anxiety who cannot understand why all that careful work hasn’t accomplished anything better.
Here, Pixar really shines. Because the animation of Riley rediscovering her joy in hockey is nothing less than brilliant. It catches the quicksilver nature of skates on ice. The flowing perfection of the game at its best and the joy, the joy of frictionless motion combined with the dynamic of sport. It’s magic. As my oldest daughter remarked, “It made me want to play hockey.”
If Pixar’s movies usually present their themes in a straightforward manner, at least part of the reason is that while animation can do things impossible in traditional film, current animation levels can’t convey the nuance and subtlety that actors provide. A great actor provides an almost effortless (at least in appearance) depth to the emotions and characters in a story. Animation can’t do that, which is why even great animated films often feel tonally flat compared to other good films. Voice can only do so much. Yet Pixar’s concluding hockey scene comes closer to providing this depth than any animation scene I can recall. They do it less with face, more with dynamic physical movement represented in fine-grained detail. Perhaps not every emotion can be captured that way as well as joy. Yet for a few minutes of Inside Out 2, animation feels as nuanced and rich as traditional film.
That’s a triumph not of technology but of art. On its own, it’s an impressive achievement. Yet Inside Out 2 brings more than a few minutes of remarkable animation to the screen. It captures, somewhat imperfectly, the great conundrum not only of growing up in our society but of living in it. So much of our life is spent cleaving to the vast expectations around us (for this credential, that job, or those cool things) that joy is hard to find. But we can’t do any of the things we care about truly well without finding and somehow holding on to that joy. Riley’s problem isn’t a problem for teen-agers, it’s a problem for all of us.
If Pixar had stuck to that one story throughout and stayed consistent to the necessities of their world, Inside Out 2 would have been near the top of the pantheon. They didn’t and it’s not, but it’s still pretty damn good. As is, it could live comfortably in the golden decade, for it has as much to say about who we are and how we live as any of Pixar’s best movies.