Film Review: Inside/Out 2

 

Sexuality/Nudity Acceptable

Violence Acceptable

Vulgarity Acceptable

Anti-Catholic Philosophy Acceptable

Allegory is notoriously hard to do well.  It either comes of as too simplistic or too on-the-nose to be effective.  It is especially difficult when dealing with complex things found in a coming-of-age story.  But against all odds, Inside/Out 2 has cracked the code.  Not only is it a wonderful allegory of adolescence, it is the best PIXAR movie since Toy Story 3 (and yes, that includes the original Inside/Out)

The movie picks up a few years after the original.  Riley (Kensington Taliman) is getting ready for high school.  Her interior emotions of Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear, (Tony Hale), and Disgust (Liza Lapira) have been guiding her emotional growth.  Inside, we find that the memories she holds onto as core memories begin to form her basic beliefs, forming a sense of identity.  Riley heads off to a hockey camp with her 2 best friends, but she finds out they are going to a different high school.  This sets off an emotional crisis where she has to choose between her old friends and impressing the older, cooler girl Valentina (Lilimar).  Inside, puberty is causing Riley to have new emtions including Anxiety (Mya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adele Exarchopolous), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser).  The original emotions are having trouble navigating Riley's new adolescent life and so the other emotions begin to take over.  Anxiety eventually banishes her old emotions and buries them deep down.  Anxiety begins to layer in new core memories, changing Riley's belief core.  This starts the quest for the original emotions to find Riley's original, innocent beliefs before her new beliefs are corrupted forever.

First of all, the movie is stunning to watch.  Director Kelsey Mann was smart to not try a complete redesign of the original, but instead added more layers to Riley's inner world.  The new character designs are also great.  Anxiety's wide eyes and wirey frame convey her emotional state very strongly, as does Embarassment, who towers over everyone else, but tries to hide in his hoodie.  The characters have a strong attribution by appearance, so that you understand their core essence just be looking at them.  

But in order for the allegory to work, it has to come from a place of deep truth.  And that is where the movie really shines.  Riley's painful social navigation is all too universal in its feel.  Social dynamics of high school are horible to navigate and perfectly relatable.  One of the great things is that from an adult on the outside, I can see how little pressure the older girls are putting on Riley to fit in.  But from inside, the pressure is incredible and perfectly understandable.

As Anxiety begins to take over, the allegory works even better.  There is a wonderful scene where we are in Riley's imagination centers and Anxiety is ordering the imagination to draw up every worst-case scenario.  I also have to say I think that this movie has (what might be) the best visual representation of what a panic attack is like both from the inside and the outside.

There moments of real pathos and depth, even from the allegorical characters.  There is a heartbreaking moment where Joy contemplates her role in Riley's life going forward and says, "Maybe this is what happens when you grow up.  You feel less joy."  That line was so potent and powerful, it reminded me of The Breakfast Club: "When you grow up, your heart dies."  So often we let the worries and anxieties of adulthood rob of us of that childlike joy.  I think this is what Jesus meant when he said that you must have the faith of child, because it is a joyful faith.  I think, perhaps, only the saints retain the joy of childhood.

I also love how our memories form our beliefs.  I've been teaching adolescents for decades now.  One of the things I've found is that they are always in search of who they are.  It is a time when they don't know who they really are, but they are getting so many messages from people telling them who they ought to be.  At first, I was a little dubious of the movie's concept of belief formation.  Riley's original belief comes down to "I'm a good person."  This is something I thought was too caught up in a self-esteem ideology.  But the movie was smarter than I gave it credit for.  The simplicity of the belief is refelctive of her innocence, which is now being changed and tested.

It was also a brilliant move on the part of writers Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein to make the characters almost exclusively female.  First of all, one of the sad realities of psychological development is that when girls reach adolescents, they become higher in negative emotion.  This is perfectly reflected in Riley's interior life.  The second is that it completely side steps the romantic psycho-sexual development of puberty.  I think this would have been too big of an issue to tackle appropriately.  Turning Red tried to handle it and it was a colossal failure.  Instead, the film makers give us an honest and insightful look into the emotional life of the pubescent female without having to lose any of the innocence required to tell the story appropriately.  As a result, this movie is something the entire family can enjoy.

Human beings are messy and complex.  And our emotions are neither good nor bad, though they can lead us in negative directions.  This movie shows how everyting, even Anxiety, has a place in our lives in its proper place.  This is a lesson that is not conveyed by preaching, but by letting us experience the inner journey in Riley, which is also really the inner journey in all of us.