UNRAVELING EMOTIONS: THE MIXED BAG OF 'INSIDE OUT 2'

Inside Out 2, the sequel to the 2015 original, is a teenage post-pubescent adventure traversing the tempestuous waters of adolescence, and is poised to recover the 100 million plus heartbeats skipped by its forerunner. Once again, walking us through the unseen corridors of a young girl’s mind, this sequel captures the journey from childhood to teenage life. Does Inside Out 2 capture the full sense of introspection, emotional complexity and authenticity that we crave, or does it barely glide the surface of these waters?

THE CONTINUING SAGA OF RILEY: AN EMOTIONAL EVOLUTION?

We meet the now 13-year-old Riley (played by Kensington Tallman) and are reintroduced to the brightly coloured inner workings of her adolescent mind, but this time we’re meant to see it through the lens of her newfound identity. Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness are all back, leading the charge as Riley’s emotions, with a particular attempt to give more dimension to Fear and Disgust.

PUBERTY: THE CATALYST OF CHAOS

As puberty hits, ‘Inside Out 2’ introduces new, slower, chattier characters – Anxiety, Embarrassment, Ennui, Envy – to capture the chaos of adolescence. It is a dramatic, sudden expansion in Riley’s emotional quota. The movie is being true to the irrepressible anarchy of early teen years, when a kid toddles out into the world like a bullet from a rifle, the sense of transformation, of fundamental change in one’s sense of self under the demands to fit in and look cool. The film faithfully, if not always convincingly, tries to capture this internal discombobulation. Inside Out puts its mirror up to growing up.

A STUMBLE IN STORYTELLING

For all its ambition, Inside Out 2 fails to tell the kind of story that matches the emotional sophistication and resonance of its predecessor. Its new emotions might be thematically relevant but they seem under-explored, thinly developed and often an afterthought – like lumps on the back of the film, where you feel change, but it doesn’t feel like totally new territory. The film’s leading plot line – Joy and Sadness trying to help Riley navigate her changing identity – tracks too closely on the original, and if any are missing, they are the ones that might have explored the nuanced interaction of an enriched emotional world.

A VISUAL AND EMOTIONAL DISCONNECT

Perhaps the most significant stumble Inside Out 2 must overcome is its attempt to align its visual storytelling with underlying emotional undercurrents. Among Inside Out 2’s many bright spots are its ideas and moments of whimsical amusement. But the emotional connective tissue that was integral to the original feels diffused. The conceptual dance between Riley’s outer world and her emotional landscape choreographed so effectively in the first film is awkward here, as the filmmakers grapple with the difficulty of depicting the volatile inner lives of adolescents in a way that feels true to its complexity and its stakes.

CRAFTING SYMPATHETIC CHARACTERS

‘Inside Out 2’, though, makes its empathy hit through the sympathetic portrayal of Anxiety. The film’s willingness to tell how Riley’s Anxiety cares about her is a window, however brief, into the soft emotion that underlies even our darkest fears. Even there, Pixar’s new take goes richer, reverberating in the many untold stories bound to arise from its concept.

FINAL THOUGHTS: THE SENSE OF MISSED POTENTIAL

If ‘Inside Out 2’ returns us once again to that heady interior vortex, then it’s also a reminder of all that we lost when the original shied away from the radical potential of mature, multifarious and, above all, emotionally complex emotions. If the first film was a new genre of high art, its sequel is another feature, beautifully creative in places and often piercing, but that still ultimately feels skittish about some of the same things. It’s effectively synthetic intelligence, but somehow not emotionally intelligent.

IN ESSENCE: WHAT IS SENSE?

Sense – in the full meaning of that word, as deployed here and throughout the rest of our lives – is what binds us together, what helps us feel, sense and make sense of the world within as well as around us. It is the pulse that runs through the emotion circuitry of all of our lives, the coherence that allows joy, sadness, fear and love to become part of the same vibrant mosaic. The underlying message of ‘Inside Out 2’, as we follow the development of Riley’s journey, is that sense-making, embedded in a profound sense of self and other, should be what stays.

And yet, in his ending, the film’s unreliable narrator – as I would otherwise name the overbearing sense of knownness that peaks in that astonishing bittersweet bookending – finally, mercifully, disappears: the movie gives way to life. ‘Inside Out 2’ may chart its adolescent wanderings with an ambition for cynical knowingness, but its best moments nonetheless remind us that framing and emotional voicing are just different aspects of a more mysterious endeavour to project our inner life out into the world, where it can be matched, measured and appreciated for the often raw and irreconcilable affair that it is. If this synaptic mirroring gets it right, it becomes not just an expression but an enactment of the cinema’s rare and powerful ability to transform our lens on ourselves into a mirror.