Inside Out 2: the BBC’s review of the animated film with the most successful premiere in history

Two years ago, Pixar released “Turning Red” (“Red,” as it is known in the Spanish-speaking world), an animated film about a 13-year-old girl dealing with puberty.

Now, the studio is releasing “Inside Out 2” (“Intensely 2” in Latin America and “Del Reversal 2” in Spain), an animation about a 13-year-old girl dealing with puberty.

It is a strange situation, as well as unfair: “Red” was one of Pixar’s best films, but it was brought to Disney+, while “Inside Out 2”, which feels like a sequel for streaming, will be released in the cinemas.

Still, on its own merits, “Inside Out 2” is a delight. And in this disappointing season, well could be the best mainstream entertainment that Hollywood has to offer.

Like the first “Inside Out,” which premiered in 2015, the sequel takes place inside the mind of Riley Anderson (with the voice this time of Kensington Tallman), where five anthropomorphized emotions are in front of a console that guides their actions.

The leader of the gang is Happiness (Amy Poehler); the others are Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. The gang finds it difficult to control the hormonally influenced Riley, and things get even more difficult when she is going to an ice hockey training camp and her two best friends tell her that they won’t be attending the same high school. that she

This sequence is a clever parody of a high-tech spy movie, as emotions search for clues hidden in the faces of Riley’s friends.

But it is also heartbreaking. Riley’s world is changing again, just as it did when her family moved from Minnesota to San Francisco in “Inside Out.”

Now emotions have to decide if he should spend time with his old friends at hockey camp or start looking for new friends.

Then Riley’s teenage hormones have another effect: the headquarters of emotions is invaded by four newcomers, led by the manic Anxietyorange, similar to a Muppet (Maya Hawke).

His companions are Boredompermanently jaded, who naturally has a French accent (Adèle Exarchopoulos’s French accent, to be precise); Shame, a bumbling fool who keeps his face hidden inside a hooded jacket; and Envywide-eyed, who is a surprisingly small and mild-mannered character, considering how important envy is in the lives of teenagers and, indeed, in the lives of the rest of us.

It’s also a slight flaw that one of the original emotions, Disgust, is green, so Envy gets a much less suitable color: light blue.

“Inside Out 2” has several of the artifices and concessions which are inevitable in a sequel. Some may remember that in the first movie, everyone only had five emotions total, so the screenwriters, Meg Le Fauve and Dave Holstein, cheated a little by rewriting the rules.

Other people may wonder why Le Fauve and Holstein express so many negative feelings and so few positive ones. Why doesn’t Riley have gratitude, pride or love? In fact, since “Inside Out 2” is about her adolescence, why doesn’t she have Desire?

Objections aside, the arrival of the new emotions is just what the story needsbecause the resulting power struggle provides the conflict that the previous “Inside Out” lacked.

Like so many Pixar animations, this one still leaves you with the suspicion that the creative team got carried away and squeezed every idea they had, thus losing the brilliant simplicity of the studio’s early classics: “Toy Story,” “Finding Nemo.” , “Monsters, Inc,” and “The Incredibles.”

But the “Inside Out 2” plot is more dynamic and less confusing than that of the first “Inside Out”.

The writers abandoned the first film’s dubious “Islands of Personality” concept and replaced it with the more poignant notion that Riley’s memories intertwine in the bright bubble that is her “Sense of Self.”

When new emotions drive their predecessors out of headquarters and into the surreal wilderness of Riley’s imagination, her precious sense of self is discarded in the process, so Joy and her friends have a clear and urgent mission: it depends. of them reminding Riley of the little girl she used to be before Anxiety started living rent-free in her head.

On the other hand, it’s not that the new emotions are absolute villains. Anxiety sees all the potential dangers that Joy doesn’t, so who’s to say she’s not right to push Riley to be more ruthlessly ambitious?

Directed by Kelsey Mann“Inside Out 2” shines with hard truths about the complex business of being a human beingespecially a teenage human being, but it’s still a fun, fast-paced adventure comedy, with even more jokes and puns than “Inside Out.”

Riley’s Stream of Consciousness – or stream of thoughts – is actually a stream, and while I won’t give away the “sarcasm” joke, the film has one of the best jokes of the year.

However, watching the movie can be stressful. Poor Riley seemed to suffer a catastrophic nervous breakdown in “Inside Out,” and in “Inside Out 2” she goes through a identity crisis.

It would be nice to see Satisfaction join the console thrills in “Inside Out 3.”

On a 5 star scale, the BBC’s verdict is 4.

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