First Look at ‘Inside Out 2’ Goes Deep as New Emotions Set In

The prospect of a new Pixar film is always an exciting one for audiences and a daunting one for its creators. Before and since moving to the Mouse House, the Oscar-winning animation studio has given us some of the most indelible films of the last quarter century in films like Up, WALL-E and the indomitable Toy Story franchise. Through toys, cars, rats and robots, they’ve defined childhoods using everyday things to get deeper into who we are.

But in 2015 they went really deep, taking us from the outside world to inside the mind, heart and feelings of an 11-year-old girl named Riley. With Pete Docter’s Inside Out, we ventured into emotional territory, literally, as Riley’s emotions are the film’s characters: Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Sadness (Phyllis Smith) and Fear (Bill Hader). They live in Riley’s temporal HQ and help dictate and measure her responses to everyday life, events big and small, with its main story focus on her family’s big move from Minnesota to San Francisco.

Recently, I was invited, along with other select journalists, to Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California for an exclusive first look at Inside Out 2, led by Pixar Story Supervisor Kelsey Mann, making his feature directorial debut (Docter stays on EP), with a script from Inside Out screenwriter Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein. Jumping two years, a pimple and braces-clad 13-year-old Riley and her two besties are headed to hockey camp in what could be their last summer together, continuing with one of Disney and Pixar’s consistent themes of loss and separation. In the 30 minutes shown, Riley isn’t simply at a physical crossroads with her relationships but at an emotional precipice as puberty decides to set in at its most inconvenient time and four brand new feelings enter the fray. At the forefront is Anxiety (Maya Hawke) with Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Water Hauser), and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) tagging along for good measure. These new voice talents join the returning Poehler, Smith and Black along with Tony Hale replacing Hader and Liza Lapira in for Kaling. “It’s a renovation—that’s kind of what it feels like to be a teenager,” said Mann. And in true fashion, Riley’s HQ is demoed by a harried construction team while Joy and company watch with frazzled bewilderment and begins to create an adversarial situation between Joy and Anxiety.

In the press conference after the screening when Mann was asked about possible influences, he revealed that the Oscar-winning classic All About Eve was an inspiration for the film. “I always pitched it as a takeover movie. And that movie, to go back to your question was All About Eve, do you guys know All About Eve?” he asked. “For those of you don’t know, it’s about like a young ingénue actress that takes over like an established stage actress’ career. And I’m like, ‘Oh, I want to make that type of movie. I think that would be really interesting.’ So All About Eve is the one I would definitely say.”

There are two fantastic elements that Inside Out 2 addresses, one of which is introducing us to Riley’s “belief system.” Spearheaded by Joy, it takes foundational moments in Riley’s life – good and bad – to create what will be the building blocks for her decisions in the future, not simply her reactions to events in the moment. Visually presented as colorful strings inspired by Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Punch Drunk Love. But with this immense power comes great responsibility for Joy, who starts to panic that Riley’s emotions are getting the best of her and begins shuffling away bad experiences to recesses of her mind and to assert a level of control. While still mining pitch perfect humor and laughs, the film goes darker too, not just with Riley but putting the original emotions in peril. But if you’ve lived through Bing Bong you know this is prime—and very capable territory—for Pixar.

Disney and Pixar have often struggled with how and when to present LGBTQ characters and relationships in their films, with one side feeling they never go quite far enough and the other resisting the very existence of them and as an animation studio with films largely directed to and about younger audiences, striking that balance hasn’t been easy. For Inside Out 2, Riley has what can be seen as a deep crush on varsity hockey captain Valentina ‘Val’ Ortiz (voiced by Lilimar) or simply as admiration and adoration. As puberty is a major factor in Riley’s life now and of the age when crushes really start to take shape, it’s hard not to look at her feelings as that. Val’s friends and teammates are…let’s just say very butch-coded so all of the clues are there. It remains to be seen if the rest of the film is more direct or leans there but even in the confines of these first 30 minutes establishes a genuine breakthrough for Pixar in a way that feels natural, because it is natural.

In a highlight of the day at Pixar (among watching camera work in action and getting to record our own character voice work) was that Mann, the father of a teenaged girl himself, and his team worked with young teen girls on language and action in the script and incorporated their feedback as well as injecting a bit of his own life experience to the film.

“I really zeroed in on the idea of Riley being a teenager because that was a hard time in my own life. The first film did a lot of good in this world—giving people a new way to talk about their feelings, and if we can do something like that for teenagers around the world, then sign me up—I want to be part of that.”

Inside Out 2 will be released in theaters June 14, 2024.