Inside Out 2 – a review

Joy and Anxiety, one old and one new character in Outside In 2

I don’t know what I was expecting from Inside Out 2. I entered Leith’s mausoleum to our nation of shopkeepers and buyers called Ocean Terminal more concerned about not finding my favourite pop corn at the ticket desk. They were sold out. Again. Hungry, I tried vinegar and salt biscuits and wasted £3.50. I left the cinema later having engineered a miss on commercials and trailers, mildly disappointed and a bag of vinegar and salt biscuits for the cleaners to snuffle.

The sequel to 2015’s Inside Out has the heroine reach critical puberty and yet the cartoon’s style remaines resolutely child-like and the narrative predicable and icky – sentimental. When time to leave and the lights came up, the cinema was full of young girls in their early teens, the very plot of the film, the advertising having been successful. What did they think of its message presented in undiluted American cultural terms?

But let’s start with the good news. The animation covered its $200 million cost in the opening week, and has gathered almost the same again on international release so far, easily covering its promotion costs: media trailers, posters, interviews, and the like. The first film Inside Out had a budget of $175 million and made $858 million worldwide. It received two Oscar nominations for original screenplay and animated feature, winning the latter. Inside Out 2 looks set to reach the same heights of financial return but I am unsure if it will be awarded another Oscar, unless the only cartoon submitted this year.

Originality of concept marked out the first animation. My review back in the day praised it for its invention, but criticised its over-complicated plot and esoteric ideas that adults might figure out, but pass over children. Inside Out 2, simplifies the storyline, but familiarity with the first version loses any new surprise and some degree of enjoyment. I laughed once, the audience not at all, not a good response for what is essentially a comedy capers with brains animation.

In Inside Out 2, Riley, the displaced tween from Inside Out, is now 13 years old, (the voice role is taken over, by Kensington Tallman, (Kensington as a first name?) which means that she’s on the verge of a whole new set of emotions. In the Headquarters of her brain, a siren flashes which means it’s time for renovation workers to bust into the place, tear down the walls, and install a new console that can accommodate Riley’s wildly contradictory set of adolescent feelings. The original quintet of Anger, (Lewis Black), Sadness, (Phyllis Smith), Fear, (Tony Hale), Disgust (Liza Lapira), and the beloved Joy, (Amy Poehler) are still in charge of her emotions but they’re now “suppressed emotions,” shoved to the back of her mind. As the story evolves they are all pushed to Memory. Warring emotions, good, bad, or indifferent repsrented by giant marbles are stored in an enchanted immersion gallery.

“Inside Out” was dazzling entertainment, yet the movie went deeper than that. In deconstructing how the human personality works, it told a tale that was moving and profound. The film wasn’t just about lifting Riley out of her depressed homesick mindset. It was about what happens to all of us as we leave childhood behind – illusions and innocence are trounced by life in secondary high school, idealism knocked out of us. The film is, to my mind, an exercise in adult nostalgia.

Inside Out 2 can’t shock us with its out-of-the-box imaginative daring the way Inside Out did. But the film’s director, Pixar animation veteran Kelsey Mann, (making his feature filmmaking debut), and the screenwriters, Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein, build on the earlier film’s playful cleverness dishing up a lesser version that lasts a happy 100-minute length.

Memory balls are stored in library-like shelves ready to be revisited or jettisoned

And what of the new crew of emotions? There is catty Envy, (Ayo Edebiri) the painfully coy Embarrassment, my favourite, (Paul Walter Hauser) to the chronically bored Ennui, voiced by Adèle Exarchopoulos as if she were the Nico of teen angst. The main newcomer is Anxiety, (Maya Hawke). She is rendered in cartoon form as a bustling bag of fighting cats, with a feather-duster sprout of orange hair and a face that’s all popping eyes, and a stretch of toothy mouth – straight out of a Wallace and Gromit cartoon. But Anxiety, it turns out, is using her monomanic emotions to get things done.

The backdrop of the story centres around an American game of ice hockey. I wondered what a Scottish audience would make of that, or a Welsh or English one. The animators wisely avoid getting into the rules of the game; they use the school training match as a metaphor for the kicks and exhileration of maturity on the move. It’s the summer before high school, and Riley, who has just led her middle-school hockey team to the championship, is about to spend three days at hockey camp. Things get complicated when she transfers her allegiance to the more adult player and dumps her primary school chums, Bree, (Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green) and Grace, (Grae Lu), Riley’s motivation is her desire to make the grade for a place in the Fire Hawks, the high-school hockey team. She idolizes the Fire Hawks’ leader, Valentina, (Lilimar), a senior who exhibits a rock-star attitude and fire streak of hair, and she’ll do anything to get in her good graces.

From then on the story takes on an unorginaland frankly boring, roller-coaster ride with her past emotions breaking out of the memoray hall and trying to get back to the activator console to fix Riley’s muddle, mixture of self-defeating emotions. We know who will win by the halfway mark, and because of this tension slackens off considerably. We are left to amuse ourselves with the visual images.

Inside Out 2 is a fable about the desire to fit in, to be part of the herd, to be respected and approved, validated as a team player, which, of course, is the exact opposite of today’s individualism as promoted by the USA. The contradiction espoused, being a one-off personality but accepted by society. Is this meant to mean being inclusive. Constrain your ambition to being a bright light in the crowd, and society will be good to you.

Any memorable moments? Not many, the blurred, impressionist style of animation doesn’t lend itself well to memory. There’s a good scene where Valentina asks Riley what her favorite band is, and after she makes the mistake of mentioning an unhip boy band, Ennui steps up to Riley’s console to create a new geological brain feature: a Sar-chasm forcing Riley to back pedal like mad. We’ve all been in that situation. And I liked sarcasm represented as cliff edges falling away as if a melting glacier of belief.

The film is entertaining but that isn’t necessarily praise. Inside Out 2 makes a good job of giving many characters space to develop. It is aimed at adolescents not adults and hits its US target. And it does well to finish at 100-minutes and not overstay its welcome. However, it feels like making a sequel by numbers. Convoluted – two plots back to back – and repetitive and, in its sanitised, Disneyfied way, the sin it commits is all too obvious, it cannot bring itself to mention the awakening of a teen female’s sexuality. Girl crushes, the passage of lesbian obsession, is impled, but that’s it. Three stars.

• Rating: Three stars
• Director: Kelsey Mann
• Starring: Amy Poehler, Kensington Tallman, Maya Hawke, Lilimar, Phyllis Smith
• Screenplay: Dave Holstein, Meg LeFauve
• Music: Andrea Datzman
• Photography: Adam Habib, Jonathan Pytko
• Editor: Maurissa Horwitz
• Adut Rating: PG
• Duration: 100 mins
• RATING CRITERIA
• 5 plus: potential classic, innovative. 5: outstanding. 4: excellent. 3.5: excellent but flawed. 3: very good if formulaic. 2: straight to DVD. 1: crap; why did they bother?