First Impressions of Inside Out 2

While it doesn't quite reach the heights of Pixar's golden-age masterpieces, we can be grateful for the wisdom and whimsy of this surprising sequel.

Ever wish you could just load up your most painful memories and catapult them to the back of your mind?

One of my favorite short stories to read with creative writing students is a disturbing fantasy called “The Hurler” by the great fiction writer Gina Ochsner, from her book People I Wanted to Be. In it, a girl builds a catapult for “hurling” everything that troubles her over a fence and into a landfill. Before long, she has a line of visitors from all over the neighborhood: People bring her all kinds of things that represent their pain — “promise rings and ticket stubs… bad birthday presents, ID bracelets, framed pictures of the formerly loved.” One even catapults a family member. And by the end of the story, we’re struggling to accept the image of a beating human heart being cut out of a person and launched into the darkness in order to free someone of their heartache. At the beginning of the story, readers are laughing at the humor and whimsy; by halfway through, the laughter becomes more challenging; and by the end a sense of horror has settled over the room.

I don’t know if screenwriters Dave Holstein and Meg LeFauve, or Kelsey Mann (credited here with LeFauve for the story), ever read Ochsner’s story. But the central premise of Inside Out 2 reminds me very much of “The Hurler.”

Riley’s growing up. Over the last nine years she’s aged… two years? [Image from the Pixar trailer.]

In this sequel to 2015’s delightful Inside Out, we rejoin Riley (Kensington Tallman) and find her mind still full of quite-literally colorful emotions.

Riley was 11 in Inside Out, and the stress she experienced as her family relocated from Minnesota to San Francisco gave Pixar Animation a chance to develop a wonderland alive with Hashtag “All the Feels.” We watched Joy (Amy Poehler), the captain of Riley’s emotional Enterprise, strive to stabilize Riley through the relocation with the help of her colleagues Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Sadness (Phyllis Smith). As feelings of loss welled up, Joy had to learn the hard way that Sadness, as unpleasant as she might sometimes be, is absolutely essential to a human being’s capacity to process change. Sadness ended up playing a key role in helping Riley be truthful about her struggles, grieve her losses, and ultimately bond with her parents in their own losses, thus increasing their understanding and love, and helping them release their pain to make room for new experience.

The dream-team Riley crew of emotions are startled by the arrival of new emotions. [Image from the Pixar trailer.]

Inside Out 2 follows a similar arc, but finds Riley suffering the first quakes of puberty. The basic crew is back at their stations — with a few vocal switch-ups (Hader is replaced by Tony Hale, Kaling by Liza Lapira). And, following Joy’s reckless whims to help Riley develop a flawless “sense of self,” they’re loading up the colorful orbs of Riley’s darkest thoughts and catapulting them to the back of her mind so she doesn’t have to reckon with them. (Hmm. Sound familiar?)