Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” is nearly here.
Ahead of its anticipated June debut Disney screened thirty minutes of the movie at CinemaCon to the delight of the convention’s attendees. Kelsey Mann, the story supervisor on Pixar favorites like “Onward” and “Monsters University,” is making his feature directorial debut with the sequel, taking over for Pete Docter, who made the first “Inside Out” (released back in 2015). Dave Holstein and Meg LeFauve wrote the new movie. For the sequel, the story is jumping into uncharted waters: Riley’s teen years.
The footage, comprised of the beginning of the movie, does a lot of table-setting. Riley (Kensington Tallman), now 13, is headed off to hockey camp with two of her best friends. (The opening is a kinetic hockey game, with the emotions all reintroduced as she deals with issues on the ice. Disgust, for instance, springs into action when Riley accidentally puts the wrong mouthguard in.) It’s a nerve-wracking experience for Riley, being away from her family and around cool kids she doesn’t know.
But inside Riley’s mind, there’s even more happening, as the original emotions – Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale, taking over from Bill Hader) and Disgust (Liza Lapira, taking over from Mindy Kaling) are woken up by construction. The panel that controls Riley’s emotions is getting replaced with an even bigger console.
But worst of all is the arrival of new emotions, led by Anxiety (Maya Hawke) and including Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos, who provided the voice of Ember for the French dub of Pixar’s last film “Elemental”) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser). At first, Joy and the other emotions don’t know what to make of these new feelings; they can’t even pronounce Ennui so Joy takes to calling her Wee-Wee. But, soon, they become concerned about their place in the ecosystem of Riley’s mind, leading the new emotions to take very drastic actions.
That’s about all we can say without giving away some very big – and very funny – jokes.
But what’s lovely about this opening 30 minutes is that there’s a ton of new technology and exposition, including the idea of “beliefs” and how they inform Riley’s “sense of self,” but it never gets in the way of a fleet and funny set-up. There’s great big icebergs of broccoli, for sure, but it never feels like you’re eating your greens. And you can feel that undercurrent of melancholy, which made the first “Inside Out” so powerful, coursing beneath the footage.
There are some notable differences from the first movie, beyond the obvious, including a new widescreen format, which feels perfect for the new elongated console in Riley’s mind and the myriad of new emotions. And new composer Andrea Datzman, taking the place of Michael Giacchino from the original film, utilizes themes from the first film but creates a sonic landscape all her own.
This feels very much like the kind of thoughtful worldbuilding that we’ve seen in previous Pixar expansions like “Monsters University” and the “Toy Story” sequels. There aren’t many tears in the first 30 minutes but we’re assuming they will come. And when they do, it’ll be an emotional whirlwind.
