1 of 5 | Joy (L) meets Anxiety in “Inside Out 2.” Photo courtesy of Disney/Pixar
LOS ANGELES, June 12 (UPI) —Inside Out imagined the human mind as a vast, expansive Pixar world run by five basic emotions. Inside Out 2, in theaters Friday, applies that world and those emotions to the next stage in life.
Riley (voice of Kensington Tallman), who was 11 in the first film, turns 13, and her emotions grow more complex as she approaches high school. Joy (Amy Poehler) still leads Riley’s brain with Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale) and Disgust (Liza Lapira).
As Joy catches up the audience on Riley, she explains Riley’s new interests and developing beliefs that form her sense of self. Just when that sounds way more organized than human personalities really are, puberty turns it all into chaos.
The sorts of issues Riley has at 13 are universal and relatable. Though she is attending an ice hockey camp, trying to impress high schoolers, the specific situation speaks to general tendencies to hide parts of ourselves to impress new people or overthink our interactions.
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Those tendencies are represented by brand new personified emotions. Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adele Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) vie for control of Riley’s brain and cause her to act out.
Personified emotions have emotions and character arcs of their own. Joy is actually not happy when Anxiety succeeds at helping Riley anticipate negative outcomes.
It’s not a stretch to suggest that anxiety can overtake other emotions in teenage years, sometimes for the rest of life. But Joy has to learn that denying other valuable emotions also can make things worse.
Inside Out 2 has a sophisticated take on anxiety. While a healthy amount can protect Riley, making too many projections on possible outcomes can make her spiral.
Anxiety alone cannot produce confidence. That Anxiety learns that lesson at age 13 bodes well for Riley’s future.
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The film uses the Inside Out milieu to address a new stage of life. The Toy Story films did that, too, as each sequel was really about what happens when children outgrow their toys, or their actual childhood.
Those are the themes but the story is that Riley trashes her sense of self to fit in, making Inside Out 2 a literal quest for Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust to rescue Riley’s sense of self from volatile new emotions.
Like the imaginary friend in the first film, the emotions encounter some other remnants of Riley’s childhood. Those artifacts make fun references to children’s shows and video games without overstaying their welcome or usefulness to the story.
The catacombs of Riley’s mind have changed since Joy last had to explore them and Riley’s imagination has been updated with new interests. The actual mechanism connecting Riley’s beliefs and sense of self looks like Avatar in the mind with bright lights and colors.
The physics of how the emotions traverse Riley’s mind work more at the behest of narrative convenience. They have fun encountering puns on sarcasm and brainstorms that manifest literally in her mind.
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Puberty also introduces a crew of construction workers handling the chaotic rebuilding, who are blatantly blue versions of the Minions. That’s fair, though, because Minions were blatant rip-offs of Pixar’s green aliens from Toy Story.
Perhaps the most impressive animation is the hockey scenes. Pixar artists animate ice skating and puck-handling worthy of the Mighty Ducks.
Inside Out is the franchise that could most naturally run forever, as there are intimate possibilities to explore pivotal life moments from this interior perspective. Follow Riley to college, postgrad life, her wedding, having kids, growing old.
Spinoffs then could explore other characters’ emotions because every single person’s life is unique.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
Long before ChatGPT was a household name, Hollywood had been making AI the villain for decades — from HAL 9000 to Skynet to Agent Smith.
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Yet the most emotionally involving spin on the terrors of tech in ages arrives not from groundbreaking sci-fi, but the smart, wonderful and tremendously funny fifth “Toy Story” movie.
That’s a surprise, since it’s a film that I really hoped would never happen. After middling “4,” which was a giant step down from the heartbreaking third, the world was more than ready for Woody and Buzz to ride off into the sunset. Woody actually did.
Well, it’s good that Tom Hanks and Tim Allen got back behind the mike, because the digital age gives Pixar’s playthings a renewed sense of purpose and atypically high stakes. Usually the gang helps a young person stay in touch with their childhood. This time, they save one in progress.
Jessie, Buzz and Woody are back in “Toy Story 5.” Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection
That’s the formative years of little Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), the girl who inherited the dolls from Andy (who’s now, like, 40) in the last movie. She’s 8 years old, paralyzed by shyness and totally friendless. Desperate, Bonnie begs her parents to buy her a Lilypad, an interactive touchscreen that’s all the rage at school.
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Yes, the baddie that Woody (Hanks), Buzz (Allen) and Jessie (Joan Cusack) must face this time is an alarmingly cute tablet, voiced by Greta Lee.
So, rather than humanity’s fears of artificial intelligence taking control of the nuclear arsenal or replacing us with cyborgs, director Andrew Stanton’s “5” taps into a much more immediate concern: screens rewiring kids’ minds.
The crew must face off with Lilypad, a touchscreen that kids are obsessed with. Pixar
Much like when action figure Buzz arrived, sigh, 31 years ago, the toys are mortified by the mysterious intruder and her luminescent ilk. As they look across their neighborhood, all they can see for blocks are glowing blue windows with zombie youths staring into the 10×10 void.
The end is nigh, they think. How can a cowboy, cowgirl and a space cadet compete against a reactive mini-computer that connects a lonely child to the entire planet?
But these toys aren’t ready for the dark recesses of eBay just yet. They go head to head — or plastic to plastic — with Lilypad, whom Lee gives a voice that’s both bestie and “Mean Girls.”
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One of the best additions to the “Toy Story” family since 1995 is Conan O’Brien’s Smarty Pants. Pixar
You may recall lovebirds Woody and Bo Peep went off on their own at the end of the last chapter. Of course, they find their way back, but Jessie is running things now. That’s a refreshing and appropriate switch-up. Cusack’s maternal performance is better suited to this particular adventure than Hanks’ “old buddy, old pal” delivery.
After a sleepover mishap, Jessie winds up lost at another house — her first one, it turns out — where a girl named Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris) lives. And it’s there we meet perhaps the best new character in this franchise since 1995: Smarty Pants.
The real misfit toys aren’t the OG crew, we learn, but obsolete computer devices from the aughts. One is Conan O’Brien’s Smarty Pants, a hysterical, hyperactive box that teaches tykes how to use the toilet. He’s been powered down for years and therefore goes berserk when juiced up.
A phalanx of lost Buzzes is a lot of fun. Disney via AP
O’Brien is — and I’m sure he’d agree — a toy trapped in a man’s body. He’s practically typecasting. And his demented acting is so energetic and untethered, you can picture Disney security guards hauling him out of the recording studio. I mean that in a good way.
There’s also a lot of fun mined from a shipment of misplaced Buzzes. We check in on the look-alikes occasionally as they morph into a phalanx of determined Navy SEALs to eventually join Jessie and Co.
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“Five” is arguably the first new “Toy Story” film to be both watched and understood by the kids of the 1995 original’s millennial audience. That shared experience is very moving all by itself.
But, even more poignantly, who can teach these young parents this vital lesson in 21st-century child-rearing better than their own toys?
The notoriously treacherous hurdles that Hong Kong telecommunications company i-Cable used to put in front of customers looking to unsubscribe from its internet and pay-TV services throughout the 2000s and early 2010s provide the premise of this Kafkaesque comedy-drama – an alternately hilarious and heartbreaking case of raging against the system.
Marking the feature directing debut of Mak Tin-shu, best known as the Hong Kong Film Award-winning screenwriter behind crime thrillers Trivisa and Detective vs Sleuths, Dog Day Evening reveals a flair for deadpan humour that might not be immediately obvious in his past scripts.
Loosely inspired by a 2014 incident in which a knife-wielding student caused a stand-off in i-Cable’s Tsuen Wan office over a cancellation dispute, the narrative sees aspiring filmmaker Tak (Yukki Tai, The Lyricist Wannabe) go berserk inside the customer service office of Happy TV after his demand to terminate his grandmother’s TV plan invites mockery from a jaded desk agent, Ringo (Michael Ning).
《一個部門的誕生 Dog Day Evening》- 正式預告 Regular Trailer
When Tak grabs a gun dropped by an off-duty police officer (Mak Pui-tung of The Sparring Partner) trying to subdue him, the heated argument escalates into a full-blown hostage situation involving several other Happy TV employees and clients, who are all sympathetic to the young man’s contractual plight.
With the release of his 35th movie, it’s obvious that Steven Spielberg is not just a good story-teller, he’s a GREAT story-teller.
The suspenseful tale he spins this time is “Disclosure Day” about the U.S. government’s attempt to keep the truth about UFOs secret.
Sinister Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) heads WARDEX (Waived Reporting, Development and Extraction), a quasi-Defense Department agency from which cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) has stolen a powerful device of alien origin along with extensive classified information and video files.
Although his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) is held hostage by Scanlon’s underlings, Daniel manages to free her and get away, igniting a manhunt.
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Supported by WARDEX’s Director of Biological Assets, paternal Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), whistleblower Daniel believes people have a right to know about the coverup, dating back to the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico, paranoia and the Nixon Administration.
Meanwhile in the middle of a TV broadcast, Kansas City, Missouri, meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) suddenly begins making bizarre, guttural clicking sounds which make no sense – except to Daniel, who recognizes the alien code.
To the bewilderment of her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell’s son), Margaret can suddenly speak foreign languages – like Korean and Russian – and manipulate the minds of everyone she encounters.
What Daniel and Margaret have in common is a terrifying childhood trauma that neither wants to remember. To tell you more would ruin the film’s many white-knuckle surprises and insights about faith in a supreme deity and the philosophical essence of humanity.
Scripted by David Koepp from Steven Spielberg’s story, it revolves around a nefarious conspiracy, cloaked in sci-fi mystery, tracing back to “E.T.” and “Close Encounters of a Third Kind.” And it’s a timely topic since former President Obama said he believes aliens are real, prompting President Trump to accuse him of revealing “classified information.”
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Sure – there are some gaping plot loopholes – but cinematographer Janusz Kaminski dazzles with a high-speed train chase. Buoyed by John Williams’ throwback score – on the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Disclosure Day” is an exciting 9, playing in theaters now.
Catch up on Susan’s recent reviews:
Susan Granger
Westport resident Susan Granger grew up in Hollywood, studied journalism with Pierre Salinger at Mills College and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in Journalism. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, she has appeared on radio and television as an anchorwoman and movie critic for many years. Read all her reviews at susangranger.com.
