Hold on a minute. Pixar has a new feature length animated movie in theaters at last? Okay, it’s a sequel. Of all the awful things, orchestrating the release of “Turning Red” on Disney Plus while marketing “Lightyear” across theaters makes one cringe. The wait to have a prominent animated feature from the studio set in America has taken way too long. Kelsey Mann has made a credible understanding of the market and the audience demand in her film “Inside Out 2: The Second Half,” which is set against the background of girls, adolescence, chaos, and warmth offering what seems to be a slightly dramatic but inescapable return to the norm.
The chipper sequel starts with the chipper Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler) who thinks she has nearly created an impenetrable system. Together with the usual suspects, Sadness (voiced by Phyllis Smith), Anger (voiced by Lewis Black), Fear (voiced by Tony Hale), and Disgust (voiced by Liza Lapira), they seek out the worst memories of Riley and throw them into a deep abyss known as the “back of the mind”, taking the best ones which now become the girl’s core beliefs. One such example the viewer gets to witness is, “I am a good person,” says Riley frequently as the audience notices it.
You cannot really defend the approach of Joy. Now 13 years old, Riley is a considerate and intelligent girl, extraordinary even by Joy’s standards.
The girl who has lost the fear of solitude in the new environment of the Bay Area of America also has a close circle of friends: Grace (Grace Lu) and Bree (Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green). The three have built such strong friendships that they have become a formidable unit on their hockey squad. Even the attention of Coach Roberts (Yvette Nicole Brown), the high school hockey coach’s concern has been raised who then offered to the three a three-day camp which features players such as Val Ortiz (Lilimar), who is Riley’s idol. For Joy and her cohorts, you can’t ask for much more.
The teenage years of Riley have been scripted by Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein in the Cool storyline and this puzzlement continuum has some substance because the biggest, most Obvious obstacle ever faced by teenagers Riley: Puberty. As a matter of fact, the very start comes with the most irritating thing, which aggravates some other occasions: The embarrassed silence of Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), the French beatnik ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), the annoying envy (Ayo Edebiri) and the aggravated anxiety.
Maya Hawke. As soon as Riley finds out that her closest friends plan to attend another school next year, there comes Anxiety ready to give Riley a complete makeover, hoping Val will love the new Riley. She pushes aside the current condition of Riley to the back of the head and banishes Joy and the other old feelings.
Before Anxiety has the chance to completely overthrow Riley’s functioning capabilities, it is up to Joy and the other characters to fix this situation and go on a journey to the back of the mind where the concept of Riley was as simple as close.
Mann doesn’t necessarily break the format the first concept “Inside Out” established. It is a simple but moving narrative about Joy and Anxiety both coming to the understanding that a person cannot be dissected. Riley is so eager to win Val’s admiration, thus denying her ex-best friends, that she becomes a mere extension of Val instead of herself. To add on, she is so driven by her competitive nature that she only feels fulfilled when she receives Val’s approval or beats her competitors.
It is mostly an enjoyable structure, as we see Anxiety reshaping Riley into an empty vessel with Joy and others probing Riley’s emotions and memories, that allows the film to confidently swoop through its dazzling visual and stylistic motifs that are light-hearted, entertaining and safe for younger viewers, while thematically focusing on the issues of a teenage girl conforming to societal pressures.
That does not imply there are not new gags along the way: over-the-top imagined characters that evoke a blue’s clues resonation with nightmares, a segment from Imagination Land reminiscent of 1984, or Mount Crushmore these are good punch lines. The new emotions, on the other hand, do not have the same impact as the key figures from the previous movie.
In this regard, Envy is rather passive given the scale of the sentiment of the emotion. Embarrassment has its especially when in tandems with Sadness. The performance of being bored is rather quickly exhausted after an impressive burst out of energy because there’s only so many times one can play the French card.
Bing Bong is undeniably one of the most famous animated characters of the last ten years, and no new personas even vaguely reach the heartwarming depth of his character. However, It is noteworthy, that the two emotions are more or less absent in the film together gradually. Perhaps, attempting to recapture the two-handed synergy that drove the first film seemed too predictable as a narrative device. But without much else in terms of narrative fabric to substitute for it, the film heavily relies on the sheer volume of ridiculous phrases it spits out at the audience as a form of a predictable large scale joke in order to advance the strategic limitations.
Similarly, this is another movie where POC, this time Riley’s best friends in Asian and Black, are used as props to facilitate the white girl’s character development. One glance at the caricature depicts the case of a White girl who is quite literally nasty to her peers. But that’s fine since she is in pain and needs her friends’ pain so that she ultimately understands how to repay them eventually. It is just more of the same cliché scenarios which prioritize one race over the other.
With those bumps though, Inside out 2 manages to move quickly and effortlessly that works as a bonus to a spellbinding and transports through phases even in the bumpy sections of the picture.
With an emotional soul at its core, the film remains an exquisite expression of the confusing struggles, extreme loneliness, and tough transitions that a majority of teens are facing at the time. Teen years are depicted as a nuisance which adults relief from since those years are already gone.
Similarly, in the final sequence of the movie, Riley, who doesn’t have the utmost pressure of winning, is filled with happiness so much that she feels as though she might float. In her enjoyment, the girl finds herself gliding and breathing through the thin layer of ice as effortlessly as a ray of light goes through a glass window. You appreciate her joy and at the same time, one can appreciate the irony of the message behind the striving, which in today’s world, people seem to have forgotten. Too simple, isn’t it?
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