Inside Out 2

Pardon Our Dust. Puberty is Messy.

or

Taking Inside Out 2 Twice a Day Will Take the Place of Xanax

It's nice to see that Disney* is permitting Pixar out of its streaming jail-cell and letting its movies open in theaters again. It seems to have paid off as Inside Out 2 has out-performed expectations—certainly Disney's—and has generated Barbie-land box office. One took the hopeful sign that allowing the only-streaming releases to have a theatrical run made them re-think what they were doing with its best—and longest-held—assets. Pixar product is just too good to be restricted to home theaters, and Inside Out 2 is a good example of why.

Sure, a couple of the sequels have been less than spectacular—Monsters University, Cars 2, and Lightyear (although not technically a sequel) had a creative lethargy backing the stunning visuals, but this sequel to 2015's Inside Out takes advantage of the inevitable march of time to expand and deepen its particular cartooniverse. That it is all contained in the mind of our gal-pal Riley (now voiced by Kensington Tallman), who survived her move to San Francisco and flourished, retaining her passion for ice-hockey (a big story-point in this one) and keeping it together with some help from her humors in Head-quarters.

They are Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale taking over for Bill Hader), and Disgust (Liza Lapira taking over for Mindy Kaling), who have negotiated Riley's emotional life in the intervening years and managed to make a go of it, despite outgrowing clothes, getting braces, and the near-occasion of pimples. Of course, she's had help from her supportive gal-pals on the hockey team, Grace (Grace Lu) and Bree (Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green). Her school has just won State and grabbed the attention of Coach Roberts (Yvette Nicole Brown) of a local high school who has invited the three to a weekend hockey camp.

Pretty easy for five emotions to handle, one would think. Especially as Joy has worked out a new doohickey that allows her to take bad memories and vacuum-tube them to the back of Riley's mind, where they won't do any harm to her burgeoning "Sense of Self." All very neat and orderly...just like kids are (he said with a wink).

But, remember how I dropped the mention of a "pimple"—well-rendered subtly by Pixar pixelators)? The night before she goes off with her friends to the camp, Riley's "Puberty Alarm" goes off, sending everyone into a panic, and requiring a crew to come in and do a "mitigation" on Riley's head-space, leaving the old crew with a new console that—shall we say?—is a bit..."sensitive". Plus, there are all sorts of new gizmo's and buttons no one's ever seen before.

Those "upgrades" are for a quartet of new emotions generated for Riley by her hormones and they are Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), who show up and decide they're going to run the place...that is, Riley...during her hockey weekend. This, of course, complicates matters, and one notices that having these guys around makes describing what happens in the story sounds a little too "on-the-nose." It's far more subtle—and entertaining!—in the Pixar presentation than the summation, which reads like symptoms in a psychological post-mortem.

To wit: Anxiety manages to rip away Riley's Sense of Self and locks away Joy (and her comrades) in an effort to push Riley to achieve her ambitions on the ice. Sounds a bit clinical, doesn't it? It's not, but shows how cleverly director Kelsey Mann and his co-scenarists Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein manage to integrate human turmoil into an adventure story that's enjoyable for kids and relatable for adults (who'll be answering questions with a smirking "just you wait..."). The kids watching this movie will grow up into the answers that had previously sailed over their heads.

It all feels like a natural progression to the original. Changes are made, but they're well-integrated (even if, in the story, the new emotions have to be shown some tough love) and one is propelled along with the assurance that the film has been nuanced to within an inch of perfection. And, of course, one is always amazed at the artistic leaps that Pixar makes between films; Inside Out 2 feels richer in its animation than the original with nice ethereal edges to inhabitants of Riley's head-space and one can appreciate the little details like the way Riley's teeth are crooked to the way ice erupts from the edge of a skate.

Those details are not what's flocking audiences to theaters to see this, but it's a value-added that can only be appreciated on a large screen. Inside Out 2 may not have the holistic concept brilliance of the first one, but it's a worthy sequel that builds on it, maintaining the train of thought while not derailing it (see how lame the concept could get?).

 

Inside Out 2 will get you right in "the feels."

* Although one notices that the House of Mouse has put on an ultra-long company logo (that might actually qualify as a short subject) onto the beginning and the end of this one as if to emphasize who's in charge. The Pixar logo is same as it ever was. Don't let that discourage you from missing the tag-line at the very end of the movie, though.

 

Caption quiz: "Anxiety...."

Inside Out (2015)

Humor Me
or
"Forget it, Jake.  It's Cloud-Town."

One should never make an assumption going into a movie because it will cloud the experience and make you not appreciate what is really up there on the screen as a personal experience, rather than by, say, assessments of critics, studio-hype, or the impressions evoked by a trailer.

Pixar's latest, Inside Out, looked to be not much. The characters are cartoon-y, and not impressive in their rendering, like (you know) Minions or like a lot of the output of Dreamworks Animation. Pixar movies are events, pushing the form of animation, digital graphics and for just plain story-smarts, and the only time they've failed (I'm thinking the Cars movies and Planes) they've really dumbed down the artistry on all fronts. Inside Out looked to be like that, a place-holder until they could get The Good Dinosaur finalized.

Silly me. Inside Out may be the best Pixar movie yet, and that is saying a very Big Something. One of the best things about the studio's output has been its story-sense—that story comes out of character. Here, they do the flip-side: character comes out of story.

One doesn't want to talk too much about the particulars in depth because there is a lot of that, and part of the joy of Inside Out is discovering that depth and just how far the writers (especially) and the Pixar team go to achieving it.  So, here's a gloss: Inside Out is about Riley (voiced by Kaitlin Dias), an 11 year-old girl living in Minnesota, into ice-hockey, and living a fairly normal life.  Her family (Mom and dad are voiced by Diane Lane and Kyle McLachlan) move the family to San Francisco, uprooting Kiley's normal, changing schools, leaving friends and on a basic level shattering her "normal."

That "normal" began as an infant when she first opened her eyes and experienced "Joy" (voiced by Amy Poehler). The emotions that drive Riley throughout her childhood are brilliantly imagined and worked out on a mechanical level, but "Joy" is soon joined by "Sadness" (Phyllis Smith of "The Office"—brilliant). "Fear" (Bill Hader), "Disgust" (Mindy Kaling—ditto), and "Anger" (Lewis Black—of course). These five emotions mix and commingle, fight and compromise, getting Riley through her day, then call it "a day" when she goes to sleep. (One of my favorite lines is this summation from "Fear": "Okay, we did not die today. I call that an unqualified success!")

Anger, Disgust, Joy, Fear and Sadness monitoring in Head-quarters.

But "The Move" has put a serious whammy on the life of Riley, taking her completely out of her comfort zone, creating a crisis of her unconscious and throwing her emotions into a tizzy—see where this is already going? It will take some serious adjustment in her head for things to be set right, and that quest is where the bulk of Inside Out if focused. It's an animated psychology lesson (that won't freak out the Scientologists, as they say the same things at their molten core), a philosophy strategem (that can't be accused of social engineering) and probably does as much as a library of self-help books to get your head on straight (and, even in 3-D, it only charges $10.50 an hour—the chairs are comfortable, too). 

It won't affect the Greek's, either, who saw personality in the same way, although controlled by four "humors," each one tied to a body function. In decreasing orders of "Joy," they are sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, and choleric. These four aspects controlled personality and informed their medicine, their social interactions, even their arts. Inside Out continues the long tradition of breaking personality into aspects which control our behaviors, our actions, and, ultimately, our lives. It examines character and motivation, not as merely a means to create drama, but to explain our selves.

It does all this and it's a flippin' cartoon!  A flippin' cartoon that looks as sophisticated as Gerald McBoing-Boing.* But, then when has a flippin' cartoon tackled childhood angst and the complex dynamic of personality? Of how past experience informs and shapes us, and ultimately guides us, whether we are aware of it or not. It's a cartoon that will entertain children with its bright colors and simple concepts and educate adults, while not preaching, but entertaining, teaching by example and inspiring a path. A warm feeling of familiarity spread through me while watching Inside Out and I can't believe I would be alone in this feeling.

This is what is amazing about the group of artists that make up Pixar, who pioneered the techniques and pitfalls of dimensional computer graphics, only to see their accomplishments copied and emulated. What nobody else has been able to grasp, though, is their story-telling sense. Because, even though the graphics sensibility is a technique that can be copied, their way of combining comedy with a solid lesson-learning prospectus, with the risk of injecting drama—heart-wrenching drama—into their films, whether its the melancholy 'When She Loved Me" sequence of Toy Story 2, the remarkable life-story prelude of Up, the basically-silent first section of Wall•e, or the furnace sequence of Toy Story 3, has taken narrative and emotional risks that only make the films far richer than any technological advance or artist's technique could create.  This is also something inherited from the Greeks.

I can't recommend this one highly enough. The most praise I can heap on it is to merely so "go." Do not hesitate. Go see it. Whatever version you see, however much you spend on it, will be worth it. 

Inside Out is "dedicated to our kids. please don't grow up. ever."

May Pixar do the same.

If you want to see Pixar's amazing graphics capabilities, the short preceding it, Lava, will fulfill that need.

* Okay, I'm simplifying there, although the characters of the emotions are definitely mindful of basic UPA cartoons.  The home scenes are the same artfully detailed images Pixar lavishes attention on.