I enjoyed the first Inside Out way back when it was released and it took a surprisingly long time for them to come out with this sequel. Arguably too long as we’ve long since lost any emotional connection to the characters and 2024 feels like a different era than 2015. The premise of Riley’s puberty ramping up all of her emotions and introducing a whole host new ones is a promising one. But it mostly feels like a reprise of the first film with the trite lesson that every part of Riley has a role to play. Even more disappointing is that it refuses to show any meanness whatsoever so it’s unconvincing and boringly low stakes throughout.

At the age of 13, Riley is happy with her life and her friendships. Inside the headquarters of her inner self, her personified emotions led by Joy, carefully curate her developing sense of self by dumping bad memories to the back of her mind. She is overjoyed when together with her best friends Bree and Grace, she is invited to a three-day ice hockey camp. But this coincides with the sudden onset of puberty which intensifies all of her emotional reactions. She is dismayed when she learns that Bree and Grace will be going to a different high school and at the camp meets Valentina Ortiz, the popular player of the Fire Hawks school team. A new team of emotions led by Anxiety arrives at headquarters to deal with Riley’s maturing self. After a clash with the old crew, the new one exiles Joy and the others to the back of Riley’s mind to build a new sense of self. Under their guidance, Riley sets out to impress Valentina, sidelining her old friends.

These animated features have been more daring about tackling the onset of puberty lately and that’s a great development. It’s amusing to watch Riley absolutely freaking out at the slightest provocation. Her parents are alarmed but the glimpse into their own inner selves show that they’ve been expecting it and that’s fun too. I loved watching Riley having to navigate the changing nature of friendships, the social anxiety of fitting in with a new crowd and wanting to conform with expectations. That all rings very true as Riley goes along with the mistaken assumptions of her new friends rather than correct them and pretends to disdains the music that she actually likes because it’s middle-school kids’ stuff. Unfortunately Riley isn’t the main character of this film. Joy and the other emotions are so the focus is on them on an adventure through Riley’s mind as they fight to get back to headquarters and regain control of Riley. It’s an impressive spectacle and a fantastic work of imagination to visualize the different parts of her mind, yet at the same time, we know that it’s all made up and not actually how a mind really works at all.

My main gripe here is that it’s fascinating to imagine Riley’s mind being decomposed into constituent parts like this but at the end of the day, it feels like no one, not Riley, not any of the personified emotions, have agency. The entire premise here is that Riley’s mind is composed of these individual emotions yet the lesson in this film is that these emotion characters don’t really get to have their way either. So the question is who really is in charge? Similarly the more they build up the inner world of Riley’s mind, the more we get lost in the weeds as we lose track of what exactly it’s a metaphor for. I really liked the originality of the first film but all this one does is add a bunch more characters to refight a version of the conflict between Joy and Sadness. I dislike how they consistently lower the stakes and decline to have Riley suffer any consequences for her actions. It keeps highlighting how her new teammates mistakenly call her Michigan instead of Minnesota because she’s too nervous to correct Valentina. Yet in the end the misunderstanding is peacefully resolved off-screen. Even the deepest dark secret locked in a vault turns out to be a lame joke. If the film doesn’t want to put Riley in a situation that resembles the real world in any way, it’s impossible to take it seriously.

I read that the reason it took so long for them to make this sequel was that they consulted with psychologists extensively to get things right. It seems more to me however they wanted to avoid any offence whatsoever and so took the safest, least interesting approach. I note that this is director Kelsey Mann’s first outing and I’m sad to say that his work doesn’t seem very impressive.