Inside Out 2 - Now on Disney+

[The Predaking]

So this movie has finally come out on home streaming, and we sat down and watched it as a family this weekend.

Spoiler free review:


The film takes what made the first film successful and does it again. The music is great, the new emotions are perfectly done, and story of Riley going through this emotional time is relatable.


Spoiler Review:

Spoiler

So Riley is turning 13, and puberty hits right as she and her two best friends are invited to a high school hockey camp. This makes anything the emotions do go way overboard. On the way to the hockey camp, Riley finds out that her two best friends will be going to a different high school, and Riley now struggles to appear cool to the high school hockey team (called the Firehawks) players at the camp. Her early antics get everyone in trouble, but she manages to befriend the star Senior player named Val. Riley abandons her old friends to be on the team with the Val and the rest of the Firehawks for the entire camp. Anxiety, one of the new emotions takes over control of Riley rips out Riley's sense of self tree that was grown from hand chosen memories, and along with Envy, embarrassment, and ennui, bottles up the OG emotions from the first film and locks them away.

Eventually, the OG emotions break free, and go to retrieve Riley's lost sense of self to restore her behavior, as Riley is trying he best to fit in with the new older crowd and keeps getting embarrassed by her best friends. Anxiety has Riley break into the coach's office to find out what the coach thinks of her. Despite being a very talented player that outshines even the Firehawks players, the coach thinks she's not ready in her notebook. Anxiety believes that if she can score three goals in the last scrimmage game of the camp, beating the record set by the Val when she was a freshman, then Riley came make it on the team.

Meanwhile, the OG emotions are doing their best to get back to headquarters with Riley's lost sense of self, and ride an avalanche of memories that were deemed not worthy of being in Riley's sense of self. Eventually crashing into roots of Riley's sense of self tree with all of the memories mixing in with the hand picked ones from Joy at the beginning of the film and the ones Anxiety has been putting down there. Anxiety has Riley going so hard she crashes into one of her best friends and gets put into a penalty box where she has a panic attack due to her not getting her third score. Eventually Joy get anxiety to step away from the console and all the memories make new sense of self tree for Riley that is constantly shifting. Riley's best friends forgive Riley after seeing her literally breaking down. Joy takes over the controls and the camp ends. Fast forward to high school, and Riley is hanging out with the Firehawks, obviously more comfortable in her own skin. Her two best friends message her from their new school, and everyone is waiting to see the roster posting for the Firehawks. Meanwhile, Anxiety and the new emotions are now getting along a lot better, and they even have anxiety a special chair to relax in.

Over all, if you like the first film, then you will like the sequel too. I give it a solid 4 out of 5.

 

[Axaday]

I saw it in the theater and was pretty disappointed.

Anxiety was conceived pretty well, I will give them that. Ennui must be French for sullen teenager. He did look bored a lot of the time, but if they hadn't named him, I would have assumed he was sarcasm or dismissiveness or just sullen.

 

[Pocket]

Wait, it released on disc before streaming this time? No wonder it sold out so fast.

I thought the Sar Chasm was a pretty good gag. Both the name and what it did.

 

[Axaday]

I thought the Sar Chasm was a pretty good gag. Both the name and what it did.

Yeah that was good.

 

[The Predaking]

I saw it in the theater and was pretty disappointed.

Anxiety was conceived pretty well, I will give them that. Ennui must be French for sullen teenager. He did look bored a lot of the time, but if they hadn't named him, I would have assumed he was sarcasm or dismissiveness or just sullen.

Just curious, but what about the film disappointed you?

 

[The Predaking]

Wait, it released on disc before streaming this time? No wonder it sold out so fast.

I thought the Sar Chasm was a pretty good gag. Both the name and what it did.

I think it was sold on disk about two weeks before it came to streaming on Disney+. I was going to get the film on UHD but decided to just wait the two weeks.

 

[Axaday]

Just curious, but what about the film disappointed you?

It just seemed like a pale copy of the original. A couple of nice touches but I mainly felt like I was watching a knockoff.

 

[The Predaking]

It just seemed like a pale copy of the original. A couple of nice touches but I mainly felt like I was watching a knockoff.

I totally get that, as it does have a similar plot where Riley's emotions get out of control, and they have to learn to work together and to embrace all of her experiences. However, I don't know what else we can expect from this concept though for a 13 year old Riley. Maybe if they went for a more broad film with lots of character and their emotions.

 

[Fero McPigletron]

I liked it well enough but, cuz of Riley's Date short, I was kinda disappointed that it wasn't about her and that guy. And I'm the one who complains that the love angle is a lowest common denominator.

I think I was holding my breath during the Anxiety part at the end. Geeez.

 

[Axaday]

And I'm the one who complains that the love angle is a lowest common denominator.

There is a story going around that the sort of backlash to the lesbian in Lightyear freaked Disney out and they made some movies to make sure Riley and that older girl didn't have an implied chemistry going on.

 

[Fero McPigletron]

Lightyear was just a bad movie overall, sadly.
Was there any rumor or anything of a plotline that Envy was the secret bad guy all along? I felt that she had the makings of one. Like, without Envy, Anxiety would have nothing to drive her.

 

[The Predaking]

I actually enjoyed lightyear, and I liked how the switched up the Vader twist from Toy Story 2.

 

[lastmaximal]

Lightyear was interesting and enjoyable, but ultimately just okay. It did have some striking emotional moments (plots involving missing out on people's lives because of getting trapped/stuck in one thing speak to me). But the bottle episode nature of the plot was a bit disappointing, as a big hook of the Space Ranger element is, well, space adventures. It's like if Cars were just McQueen on a test track for most of the movie trying to figure out how to be speed. (Plus, I would've loved to see Mira, Booster, and XR.)

Inside Out 2 I liked a lot, and hoped for it to do a bit more than it did (just because it did what it did so well). It was refreshing to see a plot centered around a more straightforward personal story, as that leaves enough narrative room for the emotions to have a story of their own. Relationships and such would be interesting, but I'm still burnt out on those driving stories, and they would create a fairly complicated plot tangle that would eat up a lot of runtime.

Anxiety was very well handled, and I loved how Maya Hawke brought some vulnerability to could've easily been a Scrappy role. It's very nice to see at the end of it that all the emotions are still driven and unified by being focused on Riley's well-being (Amy Poehler's voice warmly saying "we love our girl" always, ALWAYS gets me), despite how antagonistic they can be toward each other -- I love that even though they essentially did that again here it didn't feel like a retread.

Also, Inside Out seems to have a lot of Phantom Tollbooth concept wordplay running through its veins, and I will always pop for that.

Lightyear was just a bad movie overall, sadly.
Was there any rumor or anything of a plotline that Envy was the secret bad guy all along? I felt that she had the makings of one. Like, without Envy, Anxiety would have nothing to drive her.

I think there's a lot that drives Anxiety (she does introduce herself as a counterpart to Fear that worries about the unseen and unknown), but it makes sense that Envy is a catalyst -- the sense of insecurity that we lack something is heightened when we see that others have that something. I don't think there's necessarily anything sinister or bad-guy-ish in how Envy played that role, any more than there was in how Sadness behaved in the first one. It works fine on a purely instinctive level.

 

[Ungnome]

I saw it in the theater and was pretty disappointed.

Anxiety was conceived pretty well, I will give them that. Ennui must be French for sullen teenager. He did look bored a lot of the time, but if they hadn't named him, I would have assumed he was sarcasm or dismissiveness or just sullen.

The bit near the end with the panic attack hit me hard, like real hard. Maybe it's because how it was depicted was VERY close to my own experiences....

 

[The Predaking]

The bit near the end with the panic attack hit me hard, like real hard. Maybe it's because how it was depicted was VERY close to my own experiences....

Yeah, my wife has some issues with Anxiety, and she was hooked on this film.

 

[Axaday]

Yeah, my wife has some issues with Anxiety, and she was hooked on this film.

I liked how Anxiety employed the imagination in creating scenarios.

----

I haven't thought about it much in a while because I saw it months ago. In the first movie, Joy thinks being happy is all that is important and sidelines Sadness who just seems harmful. She gets in a terrible situation and must rely on Sadness and learns that Riley needs both of them and she's not the boss. Right?

Fast forward a few years and what is going on? Joy is in charge of the sense of self and unilaterally launches every thing except happy memories into the wilderness. She is more friendly with Sadness, but has she actually learned the lesson from the first movie? Guess not. It's what she has to learn again.

 

[lastmaximal]

I guess that makes sense too, as we can get lulled into bad habits when things are good -- including the tendency to avoid anything that could threaten that.

I was reacting like you too upon noticing that Chekhov's gun of burying and jettisoning potentially rough memories: with a bit of "this again". But then I realized this other thing I was feeling was being seen, lol.

 

[Ungnome]

I liked how Anxiety employed the imagination in creating scenarios.

Once again part of the movie that resonated with me a LOT.... I spend way too much time thinking through dark 'what if' scenarios than is healthy. Almost to a paralyzing degree.

 

[Axaday]

My daughters are rewatching the movie and Mommy is watching for the first time in the next room.

The trouble with the new emotions is that the original five do the job and are grounded in psychology. Adults in the first movie had the same ones and so did cats and dogs. Anxiety is not an emotion. Boredom is not an emotion (and the character isn't really controlling boredom anyway). Embarrassment is fear and sadness. Envy is fear and anger and a little disgust.

I don't quite remember the end and we're not there yet, but I know that they somehow kind of integrate anxiety. Problem. Joy learned in the first movie that sadness has a place because it is something that we actually need to feel. Anxiety is not. To the extent that anxiety drives us, it is fear doing the job. Anxiety doesn't need to be integrated and doesn't have a constructive role to play.

These movies are full of different parts of the mind that are populated and doing their work, just not in the control center. This movie would be structured better if the new characters had snuck in inappropriately and taken over and then get put back where they are supposed to be at the end of the movie. They could even have references to how this often happens at about this age and they thought they'd prepared for it, but it still took them by surprise.

Edit - Boredom just pushed a button on the console and Riley said something sarcastic. Not bored at all. She was anxious because she thought she'd made a social faux pas and "Boredom" covers it over with sarcasm. Ennui is listless, dissociated, sarcastic, and sullen. He is just teenagery. Not bored.

 

[Tm_Silverclaw]

Anxiety is an emotion according to the American Psychological Association.

Boredom is.. iffy, but more and more it is being classified as an emotion.