The original Inside Out was released in 2015. It was a mega hit and therefore it was only a matter of time before Inside Out 2 would hit the movie screens.
As with so many Disney Pixar movies, the concept and story were rock solid. The key to their string of successful releases (Toy Story 1 – 4, Cars 1-3, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, and Coco, to name a few) is in the writing.
Despite all the digital effects and rapidly evolving technology, which Disney/Pixar always bring to their projects, the one thing they have in common are great stories. Certainly, all the great, classic, timeless Hollywood movies have great, unforgettable stories. Since the beginning of time, storytelling is the glue that has held us together as a culture, entertaining us, educating us and instilling us with our shared values and beliefs.
The inventiveness of stories is what captures our attention. A good story often has a memorable message or point of view. In the case of The Inside Out movies, you get both: a commentary about the complexity growing up and journey into the mind of the person having that experience.
In the Inside Out movies, the main character is Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Diaz) who is on the cusp of becoming a young woman. She’s a teenager trying to navigate her relationships with her parents, her best-friend schoolmates and teammates as well as the new friends and new coach she is about to meet at a girl’s high school hockey camp. It’s a lot of pressure and angst, made even worse by the sudden arrival of puberty which sends her into an emotional tailspin.
What makes the Inside Out movies funny is the depiction of Riley’s inner self. It’s a whacky control room inside her head operated by a handful of colorful characters representing her emotional states.
The principal character is Joy (voiced again by Amy Poehler) who tries to orchestrate and guide Riley’s day-to-day emotions and behavior while struggling to deal with Riley’s anger (Lewis Black), sadness (Phyllis Smith) and disgust (Mindy Kaling).
With the onset of puberty (a moment that sets off an alarm on the control panel) comes new emotions and characters including anxiety and fear -- powerful, raging, new emotions that are the root of all teenage angst and adolescent torture.
The brilliance of the Inside Out scripts and development is the flight of imagination brought to the screen, visualizing emotions and the inner thought process, including painful memories and what we do to try to deal with them.
It’s a vast, colorful world that is both surreal yet somehow, strangely familiar. It doesn’t take long to adapt to this mental landscape and laugh at how everything works, or sometime doesn’t work. The crazy, clashing conflict of emotions is at the heart of the story.
The fantasy of little imaginary people living inside our brains isn’t a new one in the movies. Woody Allan used it masterfully in one of the funniest sequences in Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972) by depicting not only a control room of tiny people in the main character’s brain, but the sperm about to be deployed, like paratroopers in a WWII war movie, during the climax of a date. It’s a scene that brought the house down when the movie was released and one that remains outrageously funny to this day. It’s silly, but funny.
Silly, but funny is also a good description of what happens in Inside Out 2. It’s a lot of physical, slapstick humor which appeals to audiences of all ages including the kids in the audience who perhaps don’t understand all the coming-of-age comedy gags. As in all good Pixar features, there’s something for everyone.
Once again, Disney/Pixar serves up award-winning digital imagination with subtle detail and eye-popping color. They are continually refining and improving their art, with the possible exception of Elemental (2023) that oddly seemed to be made by a different movie company entirely.
Inside Out 2 is a perfect blend of a thoughtful, timeless story with Disney/Pixar’s signature brand of state-of-the-art digital animation. It’s a winning formula, which explains the meteoric success of Inside Out 2 at the box office with predictions that it will top the billion-dollar mark worldwide.
That, as they say in show business, may be a hard act to follow, but we can be reasonably sure that the production team is probably starting about to do just that, as these words are being typed.. The basic premise here has a lot of creative potential.
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