Angelus News | July 12, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 14

of our friends from the land of Ten
Thousand Lakes, Riley loves hockey
and is on her way to a training camp.
Riley is also just embarking upon puberty,
translated here as a blaring siren
alarm and contractors swarming in
and making a mess during construction.
(A brief aside to thank the Pixar
team for having the foresight to make
Riley a girl. An exploration of male
puberty would be a short film and a
horror one at that.)
This is already a delicate and smelly
time, but to make matters worse
Riley learns her new friends won’t be
attending high school with her next
year. What started as a mere hockey
camp is now an audition for new
friends and a new identity. Through
these cracks muscles in a new team of
emotions: Envy, Embarrassment, Ennui,
all following the lead of Anxiety.
Anxiety, though understandably
caffeinated, seems to get better results
than Joy, which gives her the courage
to jettison the original emotions and
Riley’s Sense of Self. Those emotions
try to return to headquarters and restore
the original Riley before Anxiety
rebuilds a whole new one based on
desperation and self-hatred.
All of this is well orchestrated. After
all, the Pixar machine is too well-oiled
by now to deliver a bad product. The
cacophony of sniffles I heard in the
theater suggests that if you called your
parents in the car driving home after
the last film, you will call them again.
But as Joy herself says in the film, as
you get older you have less need for
her.
I confess I’ve always had an issue
with the central premise of “Inside
Out,” which suggests we are but
puppets of our own emotions, the governing
force rather than a flavor. If the
Self careens so wildly based on how
you’re feeling at the moment, there
isn’t much there to begin with. We’ve
all run into people ruled entirely by
their emotions — usually in sandboxes
or in line for Pixar movies. Riley
is young but she is not a toddler, and
while we can’t choose how we feel,
the lesson should be how to control
those emotions, not to merely ride
the wave. (Such suppression might
give me an aneurysm at 35, but my
emotions will go down with my ship
knowing I was the captain.)
Moreover, none of us feel one
distilled emotion at a time. How often
are we embarrassed of our envy, or disgusted
of our anger, or maybe just sad
about all of it. Too often emotions are
a toxic tag team rather than a singular
grudge match.
As Steve Larkin of the Washington
Review of Books pointed out in his review
of “Inside Out 2,” the new emotions
arriving with puberty are not that
new at all, and don’t signal heightened
maturity. St. Augustine proved as
much with his pilfered pears: children
are complicated in their simplicity.
Hormones don’t introduce children
to the concept of envy, the serpent got
there first.
But the fatal flaw of “Inside Out 2”
is how it tries to replay the structure
that worked so well in the first film
without an understanding of why it
did. (I don’t care about spoilers, take it
up with Anger.) The first “Inside Out”
was about the reconciliation of Joy
and Sadness, with the former learning
that a healthy person needs the
latter to process life. Happiness means
nothing without grief in contrast, and
pretending sadness doesn’t exist is the
quickest way to create a basketcase.
“Inside Out 2” tries to replicate that
journey with Anxiety, despite her
almost sending Riley off the deep
end once more. Anxiety is forgiven
and given a place among the council
of emotions, even her own special
recliner when she gets too hectic.
But anxiety isn’t a core emotion. It’s a
malady, a disordered response to our
helplessness. Anxiety isn’t a moral
failing, and thinking so is yet another
permutation of its grip. Yet it remains
a maladjusted response to the problem
at hand, more deserving of a trap
door than a place at the table.
Anxiety lies to us, not by saying that
problems don’t exist, but implying
that it can control them. The worse
you feel, the more you cling to the
illusion — like a sick cycle of job
The central premise of the “Inside Out” films suggests
we are but puppets of our own emotions,
which are the governing force rather than a flavor.
security. In an increasingly precarious
world, true serenity comes not from
hiding or collaborating with those
fears, but accepting it isn’t all on you.
To think otherwise is vanity, a character
I’m sure will appear in “Inside
Out 3.”
Joseph Joyce is a screenwriter and freelance
critic based in Sherman Oaks.
July 12, 2024 • ANGELUS • 27