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Make Room for New Emotions: "Inside Out 2"
July 24, 2024
By Bessy ADUT
This is hands down the best animation of the year so far and I am terribly sorry that it took me a little while to write my review on it. I was very happy to have met Dave Holstein and Meg LeFauve, one of the writers of this incredible screenplay, at UCLA when she came by as a guest artist. This is an animated movie for children, teenagers, and the ones who have that child and teen still in their hearts. I would recommend watching the first movie before the second one, to get a better grasp of the concept.
In this movie, there are two types of characters. There are the outside characters of a teenager, her friends, and family. Then in the inside world, our characters are the emotions. It’s a coming-of-age story.
Our protagonist is 13-year-old Riley and she is about to start high school. Her main emotions accompany her being joy, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger. Riley starts building a sense of self. Joy pushes the positive memories and throws the negative memories into the back burner.
Riley is into sports and she gets invited for the ice hockey camp weekend with her friends Bree and Grace to possibly make it to the school’s team, the Firehawks. And yet, Riley is about to meet a new emotion that creates a whole lot of mess and chaos inside of her, anxiety, along with envy, embarrassment, ennui, and nostalgia. All these emotions come to her and clash with one another. For instance, anxiety focuses on Riley winning a spot on the team and making new friends, especially after she finds out Bree and Grace will be going to a different school next year.
Riley befriends popular hockey player Val, affecting her friendship with Grace and Bree. Her curiosity along with her anxiety pushes her to go to Coach Roberts’ office and she finds out from her folder that she is not considered to be a Firehawk yet. Riley’s worries and self-doubt cause her to perform poorly, in the meantime she accidentally hurts her friend Grace and is sent to the penalty box. Afterwards, Riley experiences a panic attack.
Joy and anxiety work hand in hand creating a balance between positive and negative emotions and Riley reconciles with her friends Bree and Grace as well as saving face in the sports team. Joy takes control and they happily finish the game.
At the happy final of the movie, Riley has a new friend Val along with other Firehawks teammates but she does stay true to herself and maintains her friendship with Bree and Grace. The final nice surprise is when Riley checks the recruitment results from her phone and she smiles proudly seeing that she made it to the team. And when she is back with her family, we witness their complex emotions in a humorous way as well, while they can’t get much out of Riley about how the camp went. However the family is happy for their daughter anyway.
The cast had many successful, loved and incredible names such as Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke (Uma Thurman’s actress daughter), Kensington Tallman, Liza Lapira, Tony Hale and so on.
Apparently the screenplay process required a lot of research such as consulting the author and clinical psychologist Loia Damour, as well as consulting the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley, and Dacher Keltner as well.
The film premiered at El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles in June and did incredibly well at the box office, exceeding Barbie’s success.
Here is the teaser trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEjhY15eCx0
If you are ready for a little sadness, anxiety, envy, and all the mix of emotions it’s time to go ahead and watch this movie.
We won’t be surprised if Inside Out 2 wins the Academy Award in Animation Feature category next year. I am almost certain it, at the very least, is going to be nominated. I am sure it’s out there on many streaming networks available to watch right now.
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