PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Jun 19, 2024 19:03:53 GMT -5
Like most people, I can't say I was ever clamoring for a sequel to Inside Out, because I do agree that the film pretty much said everything it had to with its concept. But, of course, leave it to Pixar to still find an interesting hook of some kind with which to tell a story. Because the core concept of Inside Out 2 dealing with a teenage Riley as she begins to experience a few more complicated emotions that a young kid/pre-teen wouldn't be familiar with yet -- Anxiety, Embarrassment, Envy and Ennui -- actually does seem like a natural progression for if one had to do a follow-up to Inside Out. Yes, the first film is a complete story unto itself, but Inside Out 2 shows that there are a lot more emotional complexities and experiences that a person can go through the older they get. To that end, the new emotions/characters showing up here seemingly out of the blue feels believable because, after all, the older we get (especially in our teens) emotional experiences can very much evolve beyond our core emotions. The film captures that particularly well in how it portrays Anxiety (voiced wonderfully by Maya Hawke) as she begins to take over Riley's mind almost immediately after arriving on the scene. Again, these new characters' arrival don't feel forced to be, but rather natural, and the way the film integrates them into the plot is equally fluid. Just as the first film honed in particularly well on the role that Sadness can play in our lives at crucial times, Inside Out 2 says something similar about Anxiety, and it's another concept that I feel will be similarly relatable, and thus powerful, for a lot of people. And once again, the way that Pixar is able to weave that sort of message into a movie also largely filled with lots of comedic antics is impressive. The movie is as fun and charming as it is moving, and even if some of the novelty here may be somewhat dimmed by the plot structure being pretty darn similar to the first, that doesn't diminish the catharsis of the ending. I can see there being a risk in these movies of Riley feeling like just a puppet to a degree, but much like its predecessor, Inside Out 2 manages to make Riley still feel like a relatable character who you do care about. And yet again, how the ending here outwardly shows the result of all the inner workings of Riley's emotions makes for another powerful climax in its own right -- and that's something that can't be discounted. I think Pixar has made some slightly better sequels in certain respects, but Inside Out 2 absolutely proves its worth and justifies its existence by finding another emotional truth to it on, and hit on it with some force. ***1/2 /**** |
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Jun 19, 2024 19:17:56 GMT -5
Inside Out 2(6/13/2024) Recently Bloomberg printed a lengthy article about Pixar in which it was imparted that executives there were planning to stop making “autobiographical” movies in favor of “franchise” efforts after the perceived failures of movies like Luca, Turning Red, and Elemental. This quote raised alarm bells across Film Twitter and while I was certainly didn’t like hearing that either I did feel like there was a certain hypocrisy in this reaction. Like, the people who wanted original movies out of Pixar were getting them: five of their last six movies were not sequels and the one “franchise” movie they made during that span, Lightyear, approached the idea of franchise filmmaking in a pretty unique way (and was mostly punished for doing so). Where was all this enthusiasm for “original” Pixar productions when they were actually making them recently? People in fact reacted to the aforementioned films as well as Onward and to some extent Soul with varying levels of ingratitude and indifference and the narrative that Pixar was “dying” continued unabated through the whole stretch and people paradoxically continued complaining that they were making too many sequels even though they hadn’t been for most of that time. There seems to be a bit of a “stated preference versus revealed preference” discrepancy going on. Well, now we’re getting a “franchise sequel” from Pixar, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing either because most of Pixar’s sequels (with a couple of exceptions) have also been pretty great despite the narrative around them. There does seem to be some excitement for this one given that it’s a sequel to 2015’s Inside Out, the last Pixar movie that people seemed to be pretty universally enthused about, so hopefully this at least gets them back on good financial footing if nothing else.
Inside Out 2 picks up a couple of years after the original film ended and Riley (Kensington Tallman) has just turned thirteen. It’s the summer between middle school and high school and she’s just won a local hockey tournament and has been spotted by the coach of a prestigious teen hockey team (Yvette Nicole Brown) who invites her and her two friends to a hockey skills development camp in order to potentially recruit her to the varsity team. She’s excited for the trip but the night before she’s supposed to leave her inner mind undergoes some big changes. We are of course privy to this, like in the first movie much of the action is from the perspective of the anthropomorphized emotions inside her head: Joy (Amy Poehler), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale), Disgust (Liza Lapira), and Sadness (Phyllis Smith). But overnight a bunch of mental construction workers re-calibrate the mind control console so that these emotions are felt in bigger and less controllable ways. More distressingly a cadre of new emotions have shown up including Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and most distressingly Anxiety (Maya Hawke), each reflecting the more complex emotions Riley will experience as a teenager. Anxiety in particular is at the forefront because Riley is feeling a great deal of pressure to impress this coach and her potential future teammates at this hockey camp. In keeping with this Anxiety starts taking over her mind to the point of shifting her entire identity in a negative way, to the point where she banishes the original five emotions to the other side of the mind and they are going to need to rush to return to the control room and keep things from going off the rails.
There’s a degree of contrivance to be found in the basic set-up for this movie. The idea that emotions like “envy” and “anxiety” and “embarrassment” don’t exist in the minds of children until they hit puberty is plainly incorrect, and even if there was some truth to it such a shift certainly isn’t going to just happen overnight. But at the end of the day they needed to up the ante for a sequel and there is a certain metaphorical truth to illustrating the way that young people’s emotions seem to go crazy during adolescence. The other big complaint that could be lodged against the film is that it’s kind of a re-tread of the first movie. Both movies have Joy being put into disarray when a new emotion shows up to seemingly rain on Riley’s parade and finds herself in conflict with them because of it. There’s lip-service early on about Joy now knowing that all emotions are important, but she doesn’t really act that way and before the new emotions have even arrived she’s been making the mistake of pushing unpleasant memories to the back of Riley’s mind in an attempt to tailor her personality. So, in some ways the movie is an exercise in re-learning the lesson from the previous movie, but to be fair Anxiety is probably the bigger aggressor in this conflict and is the one who really needs to learn and change from all this more so than Joy but Joy doesn’t seem to be fully reformed just yet despite everything that happened in the first movie.
So on some level this does feel like exactly the kind of “unnecessary” sequel everyone claims to not want from Pixar, but I think it works anyway. Part of that is just that it’s fun to check in with Riley again. This isn’t exactly a deep character really, she’s seemingly designed to be the most normal upper middle class kid imaginable and yet I can’t help but root for this girl we’ve come to know right down to her psychological makeup. The movie also just replicates a lot of what worked in the first movie and it still works. This high concept of seeing emotions literally controlling people hits a very primal bit of imagination I think most people have had about the inner working of the mind in the same way the Tron movies play into a sort of childhood concept of how computers might work. The movie also just has another really witty screenplay and a strong voice cast and comes up with some more clever ways to represent emotions and other thought processes and it’s a trick that hasn’t worn out its welcome. It’s more of the same from the first film and if that’s what you want this more than delivers, however it is maybe missing that extra bit of novelty that might make it stand on its own a little more and that’s probably going to hold it back from seeming like something particularly special unto itself. But that doesn’t mean you should look this gift horse in the mouth because like most Pixar movies it’s still a significantly better offering than the vast majority of animated family movies out there. ***1/2 out of Five
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