Inside Out 2 (2024)

Director: Kelsey Mann

Cast: Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, Kensington Tallman, Liza Lapira

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I felt like I saw the trailer last summer about 150 times, but have yet to get around to it until now.

Did I Like It: There’s a certain amount of inevitability about the movie. The original Inside Out (2015) was such a uniquely clever idea, and all came to the ominous conclusion that puberty was rapidly coming down the pike for Riley (Tallman, replacing Kaitlyn Dias). The audience starts to write the sequel in their own head. There’s not much here that isn’t covered by those passing thoughts as we were leaving the theater after the first film.

New emotions are an interesting layer, to be sure. I may just have a problem believing that any child of the twenty-first century only starts to experience Anxiety (Hawke), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) in the summer before they go to High School, but maybe I’m in the minority there.

The thing I’m most delighted by is the eventual fate of the aforementioned Anxiety. A simpler film would be content to make Anxiety into a villain that must be vanquished for all time. I know plenty of people who treat their own anxiety like that, and it more often than not renders them into something between a sociopath and a mere bore. Here, Anxiety is relegated to another part of the tableau. Anxiety can run away with the whole show and is inherently explosive and unpredictable, but then again so are any number of fuels we might use. Anxiety doesn’t have to bring down the entire operation. It doesn’t have to lead to a never ending chorus of “I’m not good enough.” It can—when properly harnessed—lead one to try to do better.

They Came Together (2014)

Director: David Wain

Cast: Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Cobie Smulders, Christopher Meloni

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. I’m strangely tempted to watch it whenever it shows up on a streaming service I’ve already paid for. Several years ago, it was Netflix, and when it came up on HBO, that temptation came again.

Did I Like It: On my second viewing of Wet Hot American Summer (2001) I was struck by a disheartening realization: after viewing the Netflix spinoff shows, I realized I liked those shows better than the movie. I bring this up here because I’m disappointed to report that I liked this film far less the second time around. It’s partially because those shows have the time to turn the absurdism up to the maximum without any need to ape the format of previous films.

So it is that They Came Together doesn’t work as well this time. Too much time is spent making sure we all know that we’re going through tropes that we’ve all seen. It borders on that type of humor that has been done to death in Cinema Sins youtube videos and the films of Friedberg and Seltzer, wherein pointing out something that another film does is the same thing as a joke. I get that the notion that “New York is another character in the film” is a hoary cliché, but there is a point in the life of dismantling a cliché that the dismantling itself becomes cliché.

Thankfully, one has no problem watching Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler do anything, so the time of disappointment goes by rather pleasantly, and the proceedings do reach for that sublimely ridiculous, even if it doesn’t do so as often as I might hope. The dead-eyed reactions of Bill Hader and Ellie Kemper went along with my own reactions, and the ultimate realization that Rudd and Poehler’s characters should never be together adds some semblance of sanity, even if things would have worked better if logic and reason had been abandoned altogether.

Inside Out (2015)

Director: Pete Docter

Cast: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Richard Kind, Lewis Black

Have I Seen it Before: Yes, although I didn’t see it in the theater, which is becoming a recurring trend with me and Pixar films. 

Did I Like It: Pixar takes such delicate care with their films, that they have yet to make an unwatchable film. There’s too much energy and craft on display to fall short of that standard. The true measure of their success is whether or not it sticks with you like a gut punch (a la the Toy Story series) or end up insubstantial confections that begin to disappear the moment the credits begin (a la the Cars series).

I can happily report that this film resides in the prior category. At their best, Pixar films have an ability to convert an otherwise banal situation (checking your bag at the airport, moving, or bedtime) into stories of epic proportions. Synthesizing what feels like an entire lifetime of reading about Junigan archetypes* into what amounts to a road movie, Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith) and the other emotions in the head of eleven-year-old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) haphazardly find their way to work together more… efficiently feels like the wrong word, as the most efficient manner for them to conduct their mission would be to have Joy run the show. Instead, they must realize that they are an interdependent system. Each will perish without the others.

It might seem like a simplistic system, narrowing all of human emotions—even for the adults—down to five emotions, but when the borders begin to blur, the story really cuts through and sticks with you long after its over. The happiest memories are usually a response to the saddest, so is the opposite, on and on until a complex human being is created. It makes one think about their own core memories, and the continuum of how one feels about all of those key moments. 

Thus, it’s one of the best Pixar films (and that is pretty impressive company to be among), and worth immediate viewing if you haven’t already done so.

*I honestly have no idea if the film has any relation to true Jungian psychology, but it feels like the intelligent thing to type there, doesn’t it?