I went to an advanced screening of "Inside Out 2" on Tuesday night. The film opens to the public on Friday.
The
film's director is Kelsey Mann who was here in 2020 promoting the movie
"Onward". (And, yes, for those of you who wonder if Disney/Pixar is
capable of making anything that does NOT include at least one sequel,
"Onward: Return of the Ian" is due out this year.)
Most of the
voice actors were back from before (including Frank Oz as one of the
guards). Fortunately, there's no Bing Bong in this one.
I
hadn't watched an animated movie on a large screen in years. I have to
say the animation technology through Disney/Pixar has reached amazing
levels. There were scenes that I initially thought were live action.
(A photo crew was credited at the end of the movie so they clearly were
adhering as close as possible to live action when appropriate.)
Having
said that, I had a couple of complaints about the animation. I thought
the mouth movements were sometimes a bit off from what the people were
speaking -- this is easier to notice on a big screen. And the light
reflected in the characters' eyes was usually wrong -- the character's
face would turn but the light reflected in the eye would stay in the
same place relative to the pupil.
The story was wonderful as
always. Four new emotions (Anxiety, Envy, Ennui, and Embarrassment)
debut as Riley hits puberty and is about to enter high school. I liked
how her parents and friends now had their own array of emotions.
Pixar
movies tend to have Easter eggs that are usually missed until your
second or third viewing. The most obvious one this time is a scene
where Joy (still voiced by Amy Poehler) finds a room of, well, basically
trolls. Anxiety is projected on a giant screen in the room directing
them to generate images of new ways that Riley can fail. Each of these
new failure scenarios is displayed on the giant screen. Joy rallies the
trolls to cease obeying this remote controller. She succeeds, at which
point one of the trolls (might have been one of the emotions) throws
something at the screen and destroys it. This is a deliberate call-back
to the famous 1984 (40 years ago!) Macintosh ad where the upstart dude
throws the hammer at the controlling screen. Unfortunately, now it will
also remind us of the newer Apple AI-destroys-the-established-
order ad which lots of creatives considered offensive.
Folks laughed and cried. I was thinking though that people didn't laugh as much as I would have expected from a Pixar movie.