In 2015, director Pete Docter and Pixar gave us all a handy visual metaphor to talk about our emotions: Many a reaction meme was born with “Inside Out,” which provided a shorthand for expressing our strongest feelings. The film told the story of Riley, a young girl from Minnesota who experiences a whole range of them as she moves with her family to San Francisco. The emotions became characters, primarily Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith), who accidentally disrupt the transmission of core memories in the factory-like system of Riley’s brain.
They then need to journey through their host’s subconsciousness to stabilize the system. For the sequel, “Inside Out 2,” Riley’s emotions, which include Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (now voiced by Tony Hale) and Disgust (Liza Lapira, replacing Mindy Kaling), have found a comfortable stasis, co-existing in a harmony that has resulted in a strong sense of self. Joy has been carefully tending this belief system, chucking Riley’s bad memories like marbles to the back of her mind, creating a happy-go-lucky kid who is totally ill-equipped for what’s coming: puberty, along with a group of new, more complex emotions.
You’ll need no introduction to them, but they are Envy ( Ayo Edebiri ), Ennui ( Adèle Exarchopoulos ), Embarrassment ( Paul Walter Hauser ) and the new emotion in charge, Anxiety ( Maya Hawke ). They burst into 13-year-old Riley’s brain — a teen who’s here voiced by Kensington Tallman —.
