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.