Inside Out 2 "glimmers with diamond-hard truths about the complex business of being a human" – and has one of the year's best punchlines. Two years ago, Pixar released Turning Red , a coming-of-age cartoon about a 13-year-old girl dealing with puberty, and now the studio is releasing Inside Out 2, a coming-of-age cartoon about a 13-year-old girl dealing with puberty. It's a strange state of affairs, as well as an unfair one: Turning Red was one of Pixar's finest ever films, but it was shoved on to Disney+, whereas Inside Out 2 has the feel of a straight-to-streaming sequel, but it's getting a proper cinema release.
Still, taken on its own merits, Inside Out 2 is a pleasure. And in this underwhelming summer , it could well be the best mainstream entertainment that Hollywood has to offer. Like the first Inside Out , which came out in 2015, the sequel is set inside the mind of Riley Anderson (voiced this time by Kensington Tallman), where five anthropomorphised Emotions stand at a console guiding her actions.
The leader of the gang is the perky Joy (Amy Poehler); the others are Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. They're finding it tough to control the hormonal Riley, and things get tougher when she is on her way to an ice hockey training camp, and her two best friends tell her that they won't be attending the same high school as she is. This sequence is a witty parody of a high-tech espionage movie, with the Emotions searching for clues hidden in Riley's friends' faces.
But it'.
