Pixar spent nine years getting back to the console. Inside Out 2 arrives with Riley Andersen at 13, two years past the move to San Francisco, and a mind headquarters that is no longer a clean operation. The film runs 97 minutes. It is an animated coming-of-age picture, directed by Kelsey Mann, written by Meg LeFauve, Kelsey Mann and Dave Holstein, produced by Pixar for Walt Disney Pictures. The tagline tells you the premise outright: make room for new emotions.
Trailer, via Pixar.
The Puberty Alarm and the Fire Hawks
Riley is entering high school. Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger now oversee a “Sense of Self” — the element of her mind that houses the memories and feelings shaping what she believes. Joy has rigged a spring-loaded mechanism that launches bad memories to the back of the mind. Then Riley and her best friends, Bree and Grace, get invited to a three-day ice hockey camp, where Riley wants to qualify for her new school’s team, the Fire Hawks.
The night before camp, the puberty alarm goes off. Mind workers upgrade the emotion console and leave Headquarters in disarray. Riley now overreacts to everything the old emotions do. Four new arrivals — Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment and Ennui — clash with them over method. Joy wants Riley to have fun. Anxiety wants her on the team and making new friends, and Bree and Grace are heading to a different high school.
Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke and the Pay Dispute
Amy Poehler returns as Joy. Phyllis Smith and Lewis Black return as Sadness and Anger. Maya Hawke plays Anxiety, and Mann has said her audition, done over Zoom from a back room at Epcot during a family vacation, moved him to tears. Ayo Edebiri voices Envy, Adèle Exarchopoulos voices Ennui, Paul Walter Hauser voices Embarrassment. Kensington Tallman replaces Kaitlyn Dias as Riley. Tony Hale and Liza Lapira replace Bill Hader and Mindy Kaling as Fear and Disgust after a pay dispute — the returning cast were reportedly offered $100,000 each, about two percent of Poehler’s $5 million. Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan reprise Mr. and Mrs. Andersen. John Ratzenberger returns as Fritz.
| Stage | Detail |
|---|---|
| Camp arrival | Riley, Bree and Grace reach the three-day hockey camp |
| Console upgrade | The puberty alarm fires the night before camp |
| New emotions | Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment and Ennui arrive |
| Vault | Anxiety has the old emotions bottled and thrown in |
| Val | Riley is pushed to befriend Valentina “Val” Ortiz |
Anxiety Runs the Console
Anxiety decides Riley has to change to fit in with the older players. She launches the Sense of Self to the back of the mind and has the old emotions bottled up and thrown into a vault. The new emotions then build a fresh, anxiety-dominated Sense of Self and steer Riley toward Val, straining her friendship with Bree and Grace. Before all this, Joy’s control had already landed the campers in trouble with the strict camp director, Coach Roberts.
The film’s strongest choice is Anxiety. Hawke plays her as a planner, not a villain — she is trying to protect Riley from a future she can see coming. That is a harder and better idea than the first film’s clean split between joy and sadness. The premise also moved during development, from a talent show to hockey, and the hockey setting earns its place: it gives Riley a public arena where fitting in has a scoreboard.
What the Sequel Gets Right
Inside Out 2 was developed from early 2020, with Mann drawing on his own childhood. The team first explored more new emotions and narrowed the field for clarity. Clinical psychologists, including Lisa Damour and Dacher Keltner, were consulted on adolescent emotional development, and a group of teenagers gave feedback on character and story. Andrea Datzman scored the film — the first Pixar feature scored by a woman.
The consultation shows. Anxiety’s logic is specific and recognizable: she is not cruel, she is early. Where the film slips is in the vault stretch, which runs the old emotions through a rescue sequence that costs time the new characters need. Embarrassment and Ennui get less to do than Envy, and the ensemble thins out just as it should be tightening.
Still, this is a sequel that understands its own subject better than most. The first film asked what sadness is for. This one asks what anxiety is for, and refuses the easy answer that it is simply the enemy. That refusal is the movie.
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