What happened to the human psyche since Pixar released Inside Out in 2015? Pixar has no idea. As a result, its sequel, Inside Out 2, continues to explicate a little girl’s psyche as if our sense of morality and self-esteem had not been altered by politics, media, or science during the past ten years.
This time, Riley (voiced by Kensington Tallman) has reached the age of 13, signified by a cartoon Puberty Alarm. Once again, we see her mental complex as multicolored forms: Crayola-flesh Joy (Amy Poehler), green Disgust (Liza Lapira), purple Fear (Tony Hale), red Anger (Lewis Black), blue Sadness (Phyllis Smith). This conceit (formulated, as before, by Meg LeFauve and co-screenwriter Dave Holstein) favors neurosis. That’s a familiar stand-up comedy perspective, but after the 2016 presidential election and post-Covid, it is misleading for Pixar to pretend that Riley represents human nature detached from any social influence.
Inside Out may have been the best of all Pixar films (easily superior to the nihilistic Wall-E), but what made it so owes to a premise that went beyond childhood innocence to imagine everyone’s psychology. Now, Inside Out 2 resorts to trite, “family movie” insipidness. Riley’s mental development is no different from live-action films that trivialize human experience.
The formula being repeated simply extends Riley’s character into multiple color-coordinated caricatures — essentially what all cartoons do. We didn’t have to be told that Pepé Le Pew is Lust. Or that Bugs Bunny is Adaptability, Daffy Duck is Chagrin, Road Runner is Energy, Coyote is Jealousy, Yosemite Sam is Rage, Elmer Fudd is Homo Perplexus. Such characterizations are simply more creative than Pixar’s banal, pre-AI obviousness.
Inside Out 2’s Freudianism allows Pixar addicts to indulge both neurosis and psychosis — entertaining the psychological detachment from reality that gave way to Trump Derangement Syndrome and that causes post-Covid susceptibility to government and media tyranny. That’s the essence of Riley’s newly added characteristics: Anxiety (orange) says of Riley, “My job is to protect her from the scary stuff she can’t see. I plan for the future.” It’s a funny line but disguises adult self-justification behind childhood innocence.
Such is the Millennial psychological condition that Inside Out 2 refuses to examine. It avoids the irrationality brought about by TDS and the Covid lockdowns. No wonder oversized Embarrassment (voiced by Paul Walter Hauser, who memorably played Clint Eastwood’s Deep State victim in Richard Jewell) resembles the big red, furry, black-fanged, tennis-shoed, tooth-shaped monster Gossamer of the Looney Tunes classics. (By definition, the Looney Tunes are all about obsessive behavior.)
But it is Anxiety who dominates the new story line while distracting from the psychological reality (mystery) that defines our political moment. Anxiety takes over Riley’s behavior by commandeering the control panel in the girl’s inner headquarters. She exiles Joy and the other feelings to The Vault, a place of suppressed emotions. This Freudian excess is meant to explain Riley’s troubled Sense of Self.
To show Riley’s attempt to fit in with more confident girls on a hockey team, Inside Out 2 turns into yet another imitation of the atrocious, snarky Mean Girls. This is where the film’s three E’s (emerald Envy, gray Embarrassment, and especially violet Ennui) expose screenwriter Meg LeFauve’s cleverness. But Ennui (“It is what you call ‘The Boredom,’” she brags with Gallic hauteur) doesn’t symbolize this era’s cellphone-induced alienation. That’s the true ennui that Apple-based Pixar is forbidden to critique. Besides, after Antonioni’s Blow Up and Zabriskie Point, Hollywood doesn’t make movies about ennui anymore. Pixar merely embodies it.
Inside Out 2 is another example of gaslighting. It is a Millennial version of Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage (inside the body, now inside the mind). The clarity of mixed emotions was fascinating in the first film, but the comic negativity here, using Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness to create Riley’s Sense of Self and Joy to shape her “belief system,” is just plain narcissism. Psychology has changed since TDS, and its moral loss is felt in this non-spiritual, agnostic cartoon.
Inevitably, Disney politics appear during a Parade of Future Careers (one of several hit-or-miss skits) where the outcast emotions ride on a Supreme Court Justice float. This connects to how the Puberty Alarm cartoon substitutes for the egotism some people never outgrow — the self-justification featured in groomer films such as Eighth Grade and Love, Simon and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn.
The standard Pixar homecoming gimmick is triggered when Joy and the others get lost in a mazelike abyss called “Sar-chasm,” described as “an endless loop of tragedy and consequence.” It’s where an echo betrays the true meaning of whatever Riley’s feeling say. But Inside Out 2’s real offense is that Pixar’s childish, cartoonish escapism misrepresents our current psychological dilemma.