Inside Out 2 follows a thirteen-year-old girl named Riley, the same girl from the original movie. It takes a look inside of her head and shows what is going on with her memories, her emotions, and so much more. Riley is at the age where she starts puberty, which comes with new emotions: Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui. These new emotions struggle to get along with the five emotions from the first movie.
Anxiety, in what she thinks is best for Riley, has the original five emotions bottled up (literally) and throws out Riley’s old sense of self and starts to create a new one. Joy and the other four original emotions must go on an adventure to retrieve Riley’s original sense of self, get back to headquarters, and stop Anxiety. In the end, all of the emotions learn to coexist and work together. They also learn that Riley’s sense of self is always changing and that is okay.
What I Liked About Inside Out 2
There are three main things I liked about the movie. The first is that they made Riley a more complex person. They accomplished this by having more complex emotions besides the basic five ones introduced in the original movie. These emotions make Riley seem more three dimensional as a person. The other way they made Riley a more complex person is by giving her a sense of self. Having her have some sort of idea of who she is makes her seem more like a real person rather than just someone on a screen.
The next thing I liked about the movie is how Anxiety is the antagonist but not a villain. In order to understand this, you first need to understand the difference between an antagonist and a villain as they are not the same thing. An antagonist, according to Merriam-Webster, is “one that contends with or opposes another.” Anxiety opposes Joy, the main protagonist. On the other hand, also according to Merriam-Webster, a villain is “one blamed for a particular evil”. Anxiety is not evil. To those of us that experience anxiety, it might feel evil, but in the movie, anxiety is not portrayed as evil. She has good motives. She just wants to help Riley be happy. The way she goes about doing that is what is wrong.
The final main thing I enjoyed about the movie was the puns. I am a person that particularly loves puns and bad jokes, and this movie was full of them. The two particular ones that come to mind is sar”chasm” and the brain storm. When Riley decides to be sarcastic, a chasm, or a sar”chasm” opens up in her head. For the brain storm, when the emotions are trying to brain storm ideas, there is a weather-like storm that occurs in Riley’s head with loads of lightbulbs flying about.
What I Didn’t Like about Inside Out 2
As there are three main things I liked about the movie, there are also three main things I disliked about the movie. The first of these is that Ennui has little to no role in the movie. Having Ennui as a character is such a cool concept. However, they rarely get any screen time. Ennui’s phone seems to be a bigger character than Ennui herself. Ennui’s phone is used by Sadness to use the control board without Anxiety and the others seeing her, which seems to be more than Ennui herself does. Yes, she does cause Riley to be sarcastic which opens the sar”chasm” that blocks Joy and the others from where they are going. I don’t think that is a significant enough role, though.
The next thing I didn’t like about the movie is that Anxiety and Fear seemed to be too similar. Anxiety as a concept is basically an excessive amount of fear. Therefore, there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference between the two characters. Fear does seem to acknowledge that they are similar due to his liking of Anxiety and her points. However, this does nothing to solve the problem of the two of them being too similar. Ultimately, I think the movie would have been just if Anxiety wasn’t in it and Fear played her role instead.
The final thing I didn’t like about the movie was that the ending was predictable. Before the movie was even due to release, I saw a video about how the movie would end with the emotions all learning to coexist together because that was the obvious thing to happen in a children’s movie. And that is what happened: they learned to coexist. There was no surprise about it. The movie had to end happily because it is a children’s movie, but the only way for it to end this way is for all of the emotions to learn to coexist because getting rid of Anxiety and the others is not a realistic choice.
Now, maybe I am being too harsh on the movie as it is a children’s movie; maybe the ending isn’t so obvious to kids. Not only that, but they say that the journey is more important than the destination, which I think is very true for this movie.
Is the Movie as Good as the Original?
Despite there being an even amount of things that I really liked and really disliked about the movie, I think the movie is still as good as the original. Ultimately, the pros of the movie far outweigh the cons. It made me laugh and emotional at all of the right times, just like the original did. I also feel as if I learned something about human nature like I did with the first movie.
