Early View of Inside Out 2

 by Bruce Guthrie

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.

The denouement of the movie -- which I don't want to spoil -- is a message that I thought was empowering and obvious for human nature -- a philosophy in line with my news sources -- but I can imagine theocrats in red states condemning the movie for.

The movie ends with a big hockey scrimmage.  If folks are into yet another sequel, Pixar could easily keep adding emotions as Riley gets older but I suspect they'd run into issues because eventually lust would have to be one of the new emotions.

I sat through the credits which was lucky because at the very end, there's a short, final reveal.  Credits these days go on forever since so many people need to be acknowledged.  It seemed to me that about half of the lead staff was female.  (I'm thinking Riley's dad was the only talking "human" figure in the movie who was male.)  I also enjoyed that one section listed 20 "production babies".

A good time was had by all!