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‘Inside Out 2’ Review: PUBERTY! OMG! LOL! IYKYK!
Anxiety meets Joy in Pixar’s eager, predictably charming sequel to its innovative 2015 hit. Sadness is still around, too, as are Fear and Disgust.
transcript
‘Inside Out 2’ | Anatomy of a Scene
The director Kelsey Mann narrates a sequence from his film.
“My name is Kelsey Mann, and I’m the director of ‘Inside Out 2.’ So here in this scene, we see Joy and the original emotions come on to this new space that’s inside Riley’s imagination. And it’s an area that’s being taken over by Anxiety. She’s working with all these mind workers to come up with worst case scenarios of what could happen the next day to Riley and how she could screw it all up.” “Riley misses an open goal. Coach writes about it in her notebook. Yes, more like that.” “Oh, no. They’re using Riley’s imagination against her.” “And Joy wants to stop that at all costs. I always envisioned this being a movie about anxiety taking over and was reflecting on my own life and how my anxiety does that in me. And the instant my head hits the pillow, I start thinking about the next day, thinking and worrying about what could go wrong and how I can kind of avoid those things. And I thought this could be something that I think a lot of people could relate to.” “Why are you drawing a hippo?” “I’m not. I’m drawing. Riley.” “Joy, you forgot her ponytail.” “Oh, I love her ponytail. Yes.” “Riley scores and everyone hugs her? 81? That is not helping.” “Visually, with this space, I always kind of imagined it like a bunch of workers in cubicles. But we’re like, well, this place is in Imagination Land. How do we make it a little bit more fun? And it was really — Jason Deamer is our production designer and Josh West is our sets art director. They came up with this really fun idea of using giant playing cards as the cubicle walls.” “Who sent that projection to Riley?” “Why would I know that?” “What is going on? Who is sending all of this positive — Joy, I know you’re in there.” “And then we’re like, wait a minute, what if the workers are actually animating? What if they’re drawing on animation desks?” “Don’t listen to Anxiety. She’s using these horrible projections to change Riley.” “A lot of this is based off of a bunch of oppressed workers that eventually stand up to their employer and their boss. And we were definitely inspired by a few scenes. There were three in particular I would refer to — ‘Field of Dreams,’ where she’s standing up talking about the book burning. Then there’s ‘Jerry Maguire,’ where he was saying, come on, everybody. Join me. I’m quitting, and come with me. And then the really iconic one was ‘Norma Rae,’ where she’s standing up and unionizing and having everybody turn off their machines.” “Yeah, there we go.” “What if Riley is so bad she has to give up hockey forever?” “What if Riley does so well that the coach cries, and the Olympics call and she rallies a weary nation to victory?” “Uh, Joy, reality is also a thing.” “And also ‘Network.’ Anger’s speech here was 100 percent influenced from ‘Network.’” “Nightmares. But you don’t have to take it anymore.” “And what better person than Lewis Black to deliver a speech like that.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “Oh, my projections!” “Pillow fight!” “Riley!” “You need to be prepared.”
- Inside Out 2
- NYT Critic’s Pick
- Directed by Kelsey Mann
- Animation, Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy
- PG
- 1h 36m
When a dumpling of an old lady toddles into the animated charmer “Inside Out 2,” she is quickly shooed away by some other characters. Wearing rose-tinted glasses, she has twinkling eyes and a helmet of white hair. Her name is Nostalgia, and those who wave her off — Joy and Sadness included — tell her it’s too soon for her to show up. I guess that they’ve never seen a Pixar movie, much less “Inside Out,” a wistful conceptual dazzler about a girl that is also a testament to one of the pleasures of movies: the engagement of our emotions.
If you’ve seen “Inside Out” (2015), your tear ducts will already be primed for the sequel. The original movie centers on the life of Riley, a cute, predictably spunky if otherwise decidedly ordinary 11-year-old. What distinguishes Riley is that her inner workings are represented as an elaborate realm with characters who embody her basic emotions. For much of her life, those emotions have been orchestrated by Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), a barefoot, manic pixie. Once Riley’s parents move the family to a new city, though, Sadness (Phyllis Smith) steps up, and our girl spirals into depression. This being the wonderful world of Pixar, the emotions eventually find a new harmonious balance, and Riley again becomes a happy child.
When “Inside Out 2” opens, Joy is still running the show with Sadness, Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale) and Disgust (Liza Lapira) inside a bright tower called headquarters. It’s here, in the hub of Riley’s mind — an ingeniously detailed, labyrinthine expanse that’s part carnival, part industrial zone — that they monitor her on an enormous oval screen, as if they were parked behind her eyes. They track, manage and sometimes disrupt her thinking and actions, at times by working a control console, which looks like a sound mixing board and grows more complex as she ages. By the time the first movie ends, a mysterious new button labeled “puberty” has materialized on the console; soon after the sequel opens, that button has turned into a shrieking red alarm.
Puberty unleashes trouble for Riley (Kensington Tallman) in “Inside Out 2,” some of it very poignant, most of it unsurprising. It’s been almost a decade since the first movie was released, but film time is magical and shortly after the story opens, Riley is blowing out the candles on her 13th birthday cake with metal braces on her teeth and a stubborn pimple on her chin. New emotions soon enter headed by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), a carrot-colored sprite with jumpy eyebrows and excitable hair. Not long afterward, Anxiety takes command both of the console and of Riley, with help from Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and my favorite, the studiously weary, French-accented Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos).
Directed by Kelsey Mann, this smooth, streamlined sequel largely focuses on Riley’s nerve-jangling (and strictly PG) interlude at a girls’ hockey camp, an episode that separates her from her parents while bringing her new friends, feelings and choices. (Mann came up with the story with Meg LeFauve, who wrote the screenplay with Dave Holstein.) As in the first movie, the story restlessly shifts between what happens inside Riley’s head and what happens as she navigates the world. Her new emotions find her worrying, grousing, blushing and feigning indifference, and while Joy and the rest of the older emotions are humorously waylaid at times, you can always feel the filmmakers leading Riley toward emotional wellness.
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