Last year, 2023, was the centennial anniversary of Disney. It was not a very good year for the company, with many of their movies failing at the box office. One of those movies was Elemental, directed by Peter Sohn, and released by Pixar. In fact, it was the worst box office for a Pixar movie since The Good Dinosaur (also directed by Peter Sohn).
The summer of 2024, movie-wise, was lacking a big tentpole blockbuster, akin to last year’s Barbenheimer. Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan were absent this time around, leaving Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine, to be the two movies this summer to reach the $1 billion threshold at the box office. Since Deadpool & Wolverine is rated R, however, I am instead going to review Inside Out 2.
The most interesting thing about Inside Out 2, directed by Kelsey Mann, was not really the movie itself, but instead the audience that my sister and I saw the movie with. There were some families with children (who might have been born when the first Inside Out movie was released in 2015), but, for the most part, the audience consisted largely of adults.
With this being the second Pixar movie about girls going through puberty (the other being Turning Red), I am not really sure what younger kids would’ve gotten out of watching the movie. Truthfully, I am not really sure what I got out of watching the movie, with me not being the primary target audience.
Some have said that Pixar does not make movies for kids, but instead for adults. Inside Out 3, the future installment, should actually be for adults. Riley Andersen is now in college, and at the start of the movie is being controlled by Nostalgia (June Squibb), looking at photos of herself when she was four years old, drawing a picture of Bing Bong on the wall.
Nostalgia is one of the new additions to the cast in Inside Out 2, alongside Embarrassment (who does not talk until the very end), Ennui, Envy, and Anxiety, the movie’s main antagonist, an antagonist that is an unnecessary addition to this movie. Inside Out does not have an antagonist, and the movie was better because of it. While Anxiety is revealed to not be a true antagonist, she definitely functions as one for the majority of the movie’s runtime.
Pixar, in general, is not the greatest with villains, relying more on the conflict between the main characters than with the conflict between the main character and the villain. In Toy Story, there is the conflict between Woody and Buzz, with Sid being more of an obstacle than a villain. They also have had a lot of twist-villains, in Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc, Up, Toy Story 3, Cars 2, Coco, and Incredibles 2.
The antagonists are not the best parts of Pixar movies. That is why they rely on the conflict between the main characters, which this movie lacks. In my view, Joy is the antagonist, but I do not think that that was the intention. Joy is one of Pixar’s most unlikable protagonists, alongside Lightning McQueen (I did like Lightning McQueen; I just do not think that he was always very likable). She takes control as Riley’s main emotion, and also refers to Riley in the third-person instead of first-person. Riley’s memories are also shown in third-person instead of first-person.
The inside of her mind should be the most creative and abstract part of this movie, but there’s very little creativity in the design. Riley herself is more of a blank slate, and even though the movie is about how her mind functions, there’s very little about her that is memorable. Inside Out 2 has some good moments, but I do not think that it is a very good return-to-form for Pixar.
