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Inside Out 2

PG 2024 ‧ Family/Comedy ‧ 1h 36m


Inside Out 2 is set about two years after the first movie so Riley is now thirteen, entering high school and beginning puberty. The core emotions from Inside Out are back and introduced to new emotions accompanying puberty: Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui. In the short term, Riley realizes that listening to her anxiety helps her to succeed in traversing the new high school social scene. This leads to an imbalance where Anxiety takes control of Riley’s decisions and the original emotions are jettisoned from Riley’s control room altogether.


From there, the movie’s storyline is fairly formulaic. To regain balance in Riley’s head, the original emotions must collect a MacGuffin or two and make their way back to the control room. In the meantime, Riley’s life begins to suffer the effects of relying solely on anxiety.


The movie is cute enough. The cast is solid. I smiled throughout but the movie. However, it didn’t pluck my heartstrings like the first one did. Also, the movie featured Anxiety too much. The biggest tell for me that the movie wasn’t working on all cylinders was that it didn’t engage me enough to ignore plot holes as they were happening. When a movie is great, it either doesn’t have plot holes or you don’t notice them until after it’s over. Inside Out 2 introduces the rule that at puberty four additional emotions enter a person’s head (and another emotion, Nostalgia, will arrive soon). However, when we look into Riley’s parents’ heads, these emotions are not present (and weren’t in the first movie). I know why they aren’t there logistically, but by the in-universe rules that have been established, they should be and their absence is not explained. Again, in a stronger movie, I would have been too engaged to notice that while watching it in the theater.


Should you watch Inside Out 2? If you loved the first one, you will like the second one. If you haven’t seen the first one, watch that one because 1.) you need to have seen it to enjoy the second one and 2.) it is the better movie of the two. 


Anxiety and other emotions
Image: Pixar

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