Oh, so you think being a kid is an emotional rollercoaster, huh? Try becoming a freshly minted teenager. When Inside Out hit theaters in 2015, Pixar ‘s deep dive into an 11-year-old’s brain quickly ascended to top-tier status; the combination of old-school cartoonishness, a color scheme that left no hue untouched, a celebrity voice cast with comic chops, and a perfect combo of childlike imagination and mature insight into the moment you start leaving childhood behind established it as one of the company’s best works to date. A follow-up was inevitable, though whether said sophomore feature would be even one-tenth as smart, funny, and moving was not.
Pixar’s sequels have run the gamut from superior ( Toy Story 2 ) to better-than-decent ( The Incredibles 2 ) to diminishing-return black holes (let us never speak of the Cars franchise again). Who knew where a potential IO2 might fall on the scale? Nine years later, we have an answer, and once again, Pixar brings us all the feels, all the time. Inside Out 2 returns us to Riley’s psyche right as she’s about to turn 13, an age that is totally kickin’ back, no big deal when it comes to emotional consistency and stability.
The good news is that this sequel is wise enough to know where and how to build on the initial premise of that first movie, but doesn’t strain itself trying to top it — a curse that has toppled too many No. 2s to count. Nor does this next chapter forget that it’s not just anthropomorphized emotio.