Pixar and Disney are unstoppable when they unite, and in this case, one can perceive, as if looking through a keyhole, the endless meetings of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and I even suppose influencers, trendsetters, and random teenagers discussing what happens in the brain of a pre-teenager.
They wanted to keep it at pre. At pre, because it allows them to sidestep thorny or intimate topics that would have been (by the way) more expected in this second part: indeed, this pre-teenager still doesn't like anyone, and that, which might seem like the biggest disappointment in a movie about emotions at this age, turns out to be a complete success. Indeed: if we start talking about boyfriends and girlfriends, we can't focus as much on what's happening inside, and we all know that adolescence is the vital stage of pain. If we got too melodramatic, we'd get distracted.
For the third part, I suppose they have reserved all the sexual/affective awakening and have rightly preferred to focus this sequel on emotional complexity. Joy, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust? No, that's not enough, let's complicate it a bit more: from the major tonality of childhood emotions we move to the minor tonality of complex emotions, the black, or blue, or dissonant notes. And, as the great protagonist, anxiety.
The result works extraordinarily well; the supposed abstraction of concepts like personality (which did not appear in the first part, and which is a euphemism for "soul") does not make the action thicker but richer. Clear, understandable, necessary. Primary emotions are not enough to configure a way of being or self-awareness, because they are more passive or reactive. What makes you one type of person or another are complex emotions, and in the adolescent case, we welcome anxiety (hyperactive, worried, suffering, self-conscious, hysterical), envy (toxic, dazzled, exaggerated), shame (irrational, instinctive, absurd), and indifference (condescending, bored, with the phone always at hand), while we learn that Riley's mental mechanism has tended to park negative memories very far away. This tendency configured a positive, solid, and luminous way of being, but clearly insufficient: personality turns out to be more interesting when it also confronts negative memories and experiences.
The environment speaks of changing teams and school, of new friends, of betraying the old ones, of insecurity in her hockey development. The parents are in a secondary role and the boys (or girls, I mean loves) we will leave for later. The fact is that we observe how anguish (the true protagonist of the film) tries to take control too often until, at a critical moment, it leads to a visible panic attack that paralyzes everything and ends up transforming Riley into a bad person. Then, obviously, comes the management.
Parents are in a secondary role and the boys (or girls, I mean loves) we will leave for laterBut Inside Out 2it is above all a reflection on the good part of anguish (it allows us not to trust ourselves or others too much, it warns us, it also makes us activate the work to improve ourselves) and its bad part (when everything is a disaster, when everything will be a disaster, you cannot work or live. And, furthermore, it is always a lie). With a brief stellar appearance of nostalgia, as an old/new emotion, which promises a lot in future installments.
If you want a hint about the most brutal and emotional moment of the film, just imagine all these emotions reconciling after the great crisis and forming, like in the base of a human tower, the team that from now on will shape the protagonist's personality. Now, after this successful second part, Riley is ready to meet someone special. Which is natural but doesn't comfort me much: I went with my daughter, precisely thirteen years old, and now there's an unknown fly that appears too often on her phone's screensaver.