Review of the cartoon Inside Out 2

The word “masterpiece” is too cumbersome and loaded, pretentious and obligatory to use. However, the Disney-Pixar animated film Inside Out, released in 2015, was indeed a masterpiece that approached children’s animation from the point of view of accessible psychology and intellectual emotionality. And literally, because the characters were personalized emotions in the child’s head. And surprisingly, the sequel, Inside Out 2, which appeared almost ten years later, turned out to be no less of a masterpiece.

In the original, the life of the little girl Riley, whose everyday life we watched with interest, was accompanied by a parallel visualization of what was happening in her brain: how behavior is guided by basic emotions (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust), how positive and negative memories are formed, how some of them remain on the surface, while others go to the deepest and darkest corners of memory or even to the garbage dump.

With the help of vivid images and clear tools, the authors touched upon even such complex categories as the conscious and subconscious. Although, of course, many witticisms, subtleties, and precise hits on the complex mechanisms of mental processes with the help of simple colored balls, rooms, and shelves… were addressed primarily to the adult audience, to those who smiled when they were reminded that of all the piano lessons they had abandoned, only the “dog waltz” remained in their memory.

Back then, in the first movie, the authors showed that adults, Riley’s mother and father, have the same conditional control panel in their heads, and the same Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust (only with a mustache, graying, and wearing glasses) press the buttons of the console (with less fervor, more prudence), controlling our changing reactions and moods.

It was this principle (that emotions grow up in parallel with the maturation of their carrier) that became the driving force behind the sequel. Little Riley turned into a teenage Riley. However, the authors didn’t cheat by simply bringing back the same Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust, only with added pimples and braces. They have expanded the range of emotions and added more complex and ambiguous ones to the basic ones that limit a child’s worldview, which inevitably engulf us and often overwhelm us (and sometimes completely strangle and suffocate us) when we become teenagers. Thus, Anxiety (Panic), Envy, Confusion, and Handra were added to the already familiar emotions. Moreover, the hysterical leader of the new group immediately pushed aside the optimistic previous leader and annexed control.

So Riley naturally turned from a happy child (we all were) into a restless, anxious bundle of hatred for others and, above all, for herself (although Hate is an emotion in its own right and even more complex, and perhaps it awaits Riley ahead, in the trilogy, where she will become an adult, get married, become disillusioned with her marriage and one day want to “kill” her husband and then plunge into an existential crisis and depression).

Sigmund Freud would surely have been happy as a child watching Inside Out 2. After all, the Pixar cartoon explains his psychoanalytic theory about the ego (“I”, self-awareness) as the main component of personality. It even lightly touches on two other components: the superego (or “super-ego” responsible for moral attitudes and the formation of ideals, in other words, our conscience) and the id (or “it”), the dark chaotic unconscious that radically contradicts the self-concept and pushes us to realize aggressive urges, bypassing laws and rules. In the cartoon, this is the moment when the good and decent Riley, who is maniacally and panically obsessed with the desire to join a cool hockey team, suddenly decides to do a bad thing: sneak into the coach’s office and read her personal notebook.

The sequel touches again on such extremely complex mental and behavioral categories as mentality and mental health (controlled and protected by the “mental police”); sarcasm, which we resort to when we find ourselves in a position in which we identify our position as weak and potentially failing, and close ourselves with a shield of sarcasm as a defensive reaction (in the cartoon it is the “sarcasm abyss”); and even such a scourge of the modern adult generation as panic attacks, which have recently been actively attacking even teenagers (in the movie, a panic attack caused by disordered anxiety management is a plot and emotional climax followed by catharsis).

In the original, Joy, which tried to resist Sadness, eventually concluded that it is impossible to be happy non-stop and that it is normal to be sad, just as it is normal to be afraid or to feel angry; and that in the end, there is no joy without sadness, they must go through life side by side. In the sequel, Joy, who tries to resist Anxiety, comes to the conclusion that there is no adulthood without anxiety and that Riley’s life and personality have become much more complicated than in childhood (and it will not get any easier, it will only get more complicated). It seems that Inside Out 3 (and I really want the sequel to happen) will be an exclusively adult animation, and apparently it will be about marriage, routine, stress and fervor at work, and a nervous breakdown that Riley will go to some fashion retreat to get treated. And the smiling grandmother Nostalgia, who in the sequel hurried (twice) to the fire without an invitation, should definitely return.