Film review: Inside Out 2 - 'Pixar gets back to something like its best'

This sequel to Pixar’s 2015 hit animation Inside Out finds Riley turning 13, and this time Anxiety is the new all-powerful emotion intent on edging Joy out of the picture. Review by Alistair Harkness

Inside Out 2 (U) ****

Directed by: Kelsey Mann

Voices: Amy Poehler, May Hawke, Ayr Edebiri, Phyllis Smith

Joy and Anxiety in Inside Out 2 PIC: © 2023 Disney/Pixar. All Rights Reserved.

Pixar gets back to something like its best with Inside Out 2, a belated sequel to 2015’s conceptually dazzling heartbreaker set inside the head of an 11-year-old girl whose personified emotions govern her everyday actions. Where that film focussed on the Amy Poehler-voiced Joy’s battle to regain control of Riley from Sadness (Phyllis Smith) after moving to a new city, this one uses puberty as a literal wrecking ball – a construction crew is involved – to throw the now 13-year-old Riley’s self-esteem once more into a tailspin.

This time out Anxiety is the new all-powerful emotion intent on edging Joy out of the picture. Hilariously voiced by Stranger Things star Maya Hawk, she’s a manic-eyed, pineapple-haired, frog-mouthed bundle of nervous energy on a misguided mission to help Riley (Kensington Tallman) navigate the mortification of being a teenager by banishing Joy and using Envy (The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (French star Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Cruella’s Paul Walter Hauser) to keep Riley in a near-constant state of panic about her future.

As with the first film, Inside Out 2 comes up with imaginative and clear-eyed ways to make the complexities of its high-concept premise accessible and relatable, be it the lovely way it renders Riley’s beliefs as musical strings connected to her core memories, or the amusingly on-the-nose way it uses random animation styles to represent her stream of consciousness as an actual stream. True, the plot is basically a redo of the first film – Joy must try to find a way to reconnect Riley to the happy girl she was while also learning that it doesn’t pay to be over-protective – but the writing’s sharp, the animation is delightful and, unusually for a modern-day family film, at a tight 95 minutes it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

On general release from 14 June