Hear
Inside Out 2 (USA/2024) Address: Kelsey Mann. Script: Dave Holstein and Meg LeFauve. Photography: Adam Habib, Jonathan Pytko Edition: Maurissa Horwitz. Music: Andrea Datzman. Original voices: Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Tony Hale, Kensington Tallman, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan. Qualification: suitable for all audiences. Duration: 96 minutes. Our opinion: good.
Many consider Intensely, the 2015 Pixar feature film made by Pete Docter, a masterpiece. Such a definition is, to say the least, exaggerated: it is a symbolic film, which constantly explains its symbols and creates new rules as it progresses. This is usually the problem of fictions that take place inside the mind – a tara that shares The origin, another misunderstanding by Christopher Nolan – because the mind and consciousness (Daniel Dennett and company aside) remain a great mystery. But perhaps today’s massive audiences require being that explicit and hence the success of Intensely then (well, and of The origin also) and the justification for the existence of Inside Out 2. Except this time we have good news.
Professional sincerity: at the end of the private function there was no enormous enthusiasm like what happened with Up, Wall-E, Toy Story 3 and not to mention Pixar’s true masterpiece, the still unsurpassed Ratatouille. But we are going to break a spear for this sequel, starting with its formal virtues: it lasts much less, explains less (after all, we already know how everything works to the point of nausea with the previous film) and is not derivative.
Riley, the girl whose mind is the home of Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger, reaches thirteen years old, faces adolescence and, simultaneously, new emotions arrive: Envy, Shame, Ennui (which is and is not “boredom”, and in English her French accent is very funny) and, above all, Anxiety, which ends up generating a disaster in the mind of a protagonist who tries to fit in and deal with her changes during a weekend of hockey training, his passion. The primal emotions are expelled from the Command Center, Anxiety takes the reins, there is a round trip and everyone must make peace with everyone for Riley’s sake. The whole plot is this.
We are going to leave aside the precision of the designs, because that does not surprise anyone: we know what to expect from Pixar in that field and it always delivers, even if it no longer surprises. Also, there are some jokes that are uninspired or directly incomprehensible due to their anachronism (the parody of the legendary Apple commercial from 1984 is unlikely to have viewers today who understand it). But there is something that elevates this film above the most recent mass entertainment: concision. And also something important that may be annoying to say, but it is the only way to represent it: that as we grow up we feel less joy. Understanding and understanding each other generates contradictions. The world is a complex place because we are. At that point, yes, the film can express a simple truth through images and excites (the adult more than the child, due to necessary identification) in a more genuine way than in the first installment, which forced an unnecessary suspense event to arrive at a teaching. Here it is perfectly inscribed in the script.
However, there is a point that we must highlight regarding what is happening today with Pixar, once the unbeatable vanguard of spectacle cinema and the studio that consolidated for mass audiences the idea that the pleasure of watching animation was not restricted to the childhood. That point is the fear of leaving someone out, of selling one less ticket because something is left out of understanding or representation. There’s something a little forced—because it’s too notable, because it’s filmed to be notable—about the cast of “out of mind” girls including a Latina, an African-American, a Chinese-American, and a girl in a hijab. It does not imply that such things do not exist, but we know that there is an overacting there, especially since none of these things play any role (which, on the other hand, implies a welcome normalization). It’s the “we have friend X” of big productions and that’s why it sounds inauthentic to us. However, that defect is the minor one.
The biggest is, again, the idea that nothing should be implied, nothing should be ambiguous although the moral – paradox of paradoxes – is that people are not definitively bad or good, or that good people can behave badly. It is in the plot or, to be much more precise, in the script where this is noticeable. And in the humor: except for the moment in which the characters are locked in a “vault of secrets” (there is a bit of the great anarchic heritage of Looney Tunes and it is appreciated), it does not end up working, as if the melancholy that ends up impregnating -reasonably- the goodbye to childhood, invading even the moments of pure play.
That is the big non-technical problem of both. Intensely: they don’t play, they don’t have fun, they don’t offer the viewer the abstract joy that Mike Wazowski and John Sullivan did, or the Simpsonian family dynamics of The Incredibles. Film utilitarianism is going to end up ruining the fun, as Riley almost does about hockey towards the end of the film. Luckily, she lives in a world where movies that take place in a person’s mind are not released.
