< New emotions emerge in 'Inside Out 2' — including nostalgia for the original film

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Nine years after "Inside Out" became one of Pixar's most successful animated features, a new sequel takes us back inside the mind of a girl named Riley. In "Inside Out 2," Riley is now 13, and she and her five emotions - Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust - are about to experience puberty. The movie opens today in theaters, and our film critic Justin Chang has this review.

JUSTIN CHANG, BYLINE: As "Inside Out 2" gets underway, things are looking up for Riley, the hockey-loving kid who moved with her parents from Minnesota to San Francisco in the first "Inside Out." She's adjusted to her new life, school and friends. And her five personified emotions, who share the high-tech headquarters of her brain, have learned to work together in relative harmony.

Joy, voiced by Amy Poehler, is still mostly in charge. But now she and Sadness, the incomparable Phyllis Smith, make a great team, along with the other key emotions, Anger, Fear and Disgust. But now Riley is 13, which means pimples, growth spurts and a much more complicated emotional life. The director, Kelsey Mann - taking over for the first film's Pete Docter - cleverly dramatizes the onset of puberty as a huge disruption for Joy and company, who don't know why their usual routine is suddenly causing Riley to undergo wild mood swings. In this scene, Joy sees that the team's command console has turned an unfamiliar color and learns that a new emotion has joined headquarters, Anxiety, voiced by a terrific Maya Hawke.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "INSIDE OUT 2")

AMY POEHLER: (As Joy) Orange? Who made the console orange?

LEWIS BLACK: (As Anger) Do I look orange?

TONY HALE: (As Fear) I didn't touch it.

LIZA LAPIRA: (As Disgust) Orange is not my color.

PHYLLIS SMITH: (As Sadness) Not me.

MAYA HAWKE: (As Anxiety) Hello, everybody. Oh, my gosh. I am just such a huge fan of yours, and now here I am meeting you face to face. OK, how can I help? I can take notes, get coffee, manage your calendar, walk your dog, carry your things, watch you sleep.

POEHLER: (As Joy) Wow. You have a lot of energy. Maybe you could just stay in one place.

HAWKE: (As Anxiety) Anything. Just call my name, and I'm here for you.

POEHLER: (As Joy) OK, love that. And what was your name again?

HAWKE: (As Anxiety) Oh, I'm sorry. I can get ahead of myself. I'm Anxiety. I'm one of Riley's new emotions, and we are just super-jazzed to be here. Where can I put my stuff?

POEHLER: (As Joy) What do you mean we?

CHANG: Yes, Anxiety has brought along her own team of emotions. They're basically the three E's - Envy, Ennui and Embarrassment, voiced by Ayo Edebiri, Adele Exarchopoulos and Paul Walter Hauser. Some of this stretches conceptual credibility. Surely this isn't the first time in her life that Riley has experienced some of those feelings. But that's part of the whimsical pleasure of the "Inside Out" films. It's fun to feel your own brain arguing with how it's represented. It's also fun to see new regions of Riley's mental landscape, like the giant ravine that fuels her contemptuous side. Naturally, it's called the Sar-Chasm.

The story kicks into gear when Riley is sent to an elite three-day hockey camp where she's forced to make some tough decisions like whether to stick with her two closest friends or hang out with the cool, older kids. As the pressure on Riley mounts and the competition gets more cutthroat, it's Anxiety who emerges as the movie's villain. Hawke does a great job of making the character's polite bundle of nerves routine a little more annoying and sinister in every scene. Anxiety basically engineers a hostile takeover of Riley's mind, banishing Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust to the outskirts of consciousness and setting out to mold Riley into a more successful version of herself. What she's unwittingly doing is making Riley more ambitious and conniving.

"Inside Out 2," in other words, is something of an anti stress movie where unchecked drivenness can destroy a person's true sense of self. It's hard to argue with that. But it's also hard not to push back a little. This isn't the first Pixar movie that's tried to teach us to lighten up and let things go, a lesson that dates as far back as the first "Toy Story." But it's always struck me as a bit rich coming from Pixar, given the hyper-ambition and perfectionism that have long defined the studio's brand.

Fortunately, there is a better, deeper message at the heart of "Inside Out 2" that encourages us to take a more expansive view of ourselves, to acknowledge that we all have the capacity for good and bad. As in the first movie, the goal is to strive for balance, embrace complexity and learn to be OK with imperfection. I'm trying to do that myself with "Inside Out 2," which, despite its many pleasures, is a pretty imperfect movie. It isn't nearly as emotionally overwhelming as its predecessor, but how could it be? The first "Inside Out" was a piercing lament for childhood's end, with Joy and Sadness' frenemy dynamic as its irresistible core. Now Riley's older and maturing, and it's natural that her latest adventure should hit us differently.

But there are also some bewildering choices here that suggest the story could have used, well, a rethink. There's one overlong sequence in which Joy and her friends encounter memories of old cartoon and video game characters buried deep in Riley's mind. It's a cheap gag, and it almost pulled me out of the movie entirely. And there's a recurring joke involving Riley's sense of nostalgia that strikes a weirdly sour note. Ironically, it made me feel a little nostalgic myself for the days when Pixar would have known to leave a bit like that on the cutting room floor.

DAVIES: Justin Chang is a film critic at the New Yorker. He reviewed the new Pixar animated feature "Inside Out 2." On Monday's show, we speak with comic and actor Hannah Einbinder. She's co-starred in the hit show "Hacks" for the last three seasons, playing a young writer in a love-hate relationship with her boss, a veteran comedian played by Jean Smart. Einbinder also has a new special on Max called "Everything Must Go." I hope you can join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF JIM BEARD'S "HOLIDAY (FOR JIM AND GLADYS)")

DAVIES: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman, Julian Herzfeld and Al Banks. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Joel Wolfram and Kayla Lattimore. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.

(SOUNDBITE OF JIM BEARD'S "HOLIDAY (FOR JIM AND GLADYS)")

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