Nine years ago, the movie “Inside Out” pulled Pixar out of a creative rut. The groundbreaking, Disney-owned animation studio was delivering dud after dud, such as “Cars 2,” “Brave” and “Monsters University.”
And then came “Inside Out,” with a voice cast led by Amy Poehler, which returned it to the inventive glory days of “Toy Story” and “Ratatouille.”
Almost a decade later, Pixar’s crisis is now existential. Its fortunes at the box office have plummeted, the movies often stink, it’s been forced to lay off staffers and is quickly losing its once-dictatorial grip on American childhoods.
So, it’s praying the sequel “Inside Out 2” saves it yet again.
How does the second flick match up to the original? Appropriate for a film about cute, talking emotions that live in our heads, my feelings are a little complicated.
Without a doubt, families could not do better than “Inside Out 2” at the movies right now. It’s whipsmart, funny and chockablock with predictably clever touches. The voice acting is top-notch.
But, well-made though the film undeniably is, there is nevertheless a missing magic that so often occurs when there’s a “2” in the title.
A dejected Joy’s astute observation about young Riley also applies to most ongoing franchises: “Maybe this is what happens when you grow up — you feel less joy.”
Joy (voiced by Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Tony Hale), Anger (Lewis Black) and Disgust (Liza Lapira) are back and still controlling Riley’s brain — only now she’s 13 and about to attend high school.
Then, inside her impressionable mind, a demolition crew lays waste to their “headquarters,” and in pops a group of hormonal emotions: Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos).
Uh oh! Puberty has arrived.
The newbies are all a hoot. Anxiety is conceived as a high-strung, orange feather duster, while Ennui is represented by an unimpressed French woman. Embarrassment is a hulking lad who constantly blushes and hides his mug with a hoodie.
But, just like any modernizing workplace, the old guard butts heads with the new. When Riley heads off to hockey camp for the summer and is looking to make friends, Anxiety banishes Joy and Co. to a vault of repressed emotions and forces the teen to abandon her “sense of self” in order to ruthlessly get ahead.
“Riley’s life is more complex now,” Anxiety evilly says. “It requires more sophisticated emotions than you.”
So, our heroes must claw their way from the back of the mind, in action-adventure fashion, to wrestle control of their girl. The ending, of course, is more layered than simply ridding life of anxiety and embarrassment. If only.
You can’t help but admire the geeky concoctions in director Kelsey Mann’s movie, like the “sar-chasm,” a rocky gorge of tonal misunderstanding. And Riley’s imagination, as a teen, has corroded into a sweatshop that pumps out the worst possible outcomes. There’s also Mount Crushmore, populated by dream boyfriends, and a gossip rag called the Rumor Mill.
Audiences, I suspect, will fall hard for Pouchy, a talking fanny pack from a “Dora The Explorer”-esque show called “Bloofy,” who is the funniest Pixar character since Forky from “Toy Story 4.
Yes, there is a lot to like here.
Missing this time, though, is the satisfying gut-punch of Richard Kind’s Bing Bong from the first film. Nothing in “2” has you wiping away tears like you did during that, “WALL-E,” “Up” or “Toy Story 3.” This coming-of-age story about emotions doesn’t bubble up enough of our own.
And the setup lacks novelty. The plot is much the same as in the 2015 movie when Disgust, Fear and Anger took charge and Joy and Sadness had to find their way home to fix things.
In the end, that’s all OK. We hold Pixar to a higher standard because of the true art it has achieved over the past – gulp – 30 years.
If “Inside Out 2” doesn’t quite reach those heights, it is still a promising step on the studio’s difficult quest to rediscover its own sense of self.
