REVIEW:
Inside Out 2 continues the downward spiral for Disney Pixar movies. It hasn’t been that long since the back to back years of 2020 and 2021 where these studios gave us Onward, Encanto, Soul, and Raya and the Last Dragon, and yet it seems like the warmth of creativity and imagination has run dry. Even last years Elemental seemed to have potential in world building until it turned out to be little more than a comical take on Romeo and Juliet.
So it can’t really come as a surprise that Inside Out 2 isn’t that great. Especially not when you consider that the original film wasn’t particularly special, and now this is the sequel. This movie is about Riley, our protagonist from the first movie, now going to high school. Only Riley isn’t really the protagonist and never was. The main characters are her feelings, and their way of dealing with Riley while inside of her.
In this movie there are four new feelings that come along. The idea is that with a new location, going off to a new school, come new feelings. And at one point in the movie those new feelings become villainous. Especially Anxiety, voiced by Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke. These new feelings imprison our lovable heroes from the first movie (Joy, Anger, Fear, Sadness, Disgust,) and we now spend the rest of the movie watching these characters escape and then try to get back to central headquarters to stop Anxiety. It’s a pretty routine story, with not a whole lot interesting,
it seems like these movies are based around the idea that one feeling is either bad or messes things up for all the others. In the first movie it was Sadness. And that worked because there was an interesting lesson there about how we need Sadness. Here Anxiety wanting to make everything bad for everyone just seems really villainous. It seems forced. And it does not make for a very good movie.