Inside Out 2

How do you transcend transcendence? That was the impossible task set for Inside Out 2, which is – not to be cruel – a lesser film in every way to its predecessor, Pete Docter’s 2015 Pixar film that brought a breathtaking inventiveness to exploring and explaining the life of the mind. The newness, unavoidably, has rubbed off.

A quick run-through by Joy (voiced by Poehler), the driving emotion inside of the head of San Francisco transplant Riley (Tallman), recaps the first film and reintroduces Riley, now 13 and a happy, well-adjusted kid on the brink of high school and her greatest ambition, making the ice hockey team. Joy has found peace sharing the wheel with her fellow emotions: Anger (Black), a fire-breathing ragemonster; Sadness (Smith), an existential slump, Sad Trombone personifed; the eye-rolling, grimacing Disgust (Lapira, replacing the original’s Mindy Kaling); and shrieking Fear (Tony Hale, replacing Bill Hader). All, seemingly, is contentment.

That is, until puberty announces itself like a five-alarm fire and Joy – who, let’s be honest, is a total control freak – deals with the intrusion the same way she does most uncomfortable thoughts or icky feelings: by banishing them deep in the recesses of Riley’s mind. That strategy works until it doesn’t, when the arrival of a whole new batch of emotions complicates the delicate balance they’ve struck at HQ.

Envy (Edebiri), Embarrassment (Hauser), and Ennui (Exarchopoulos) are bit players (and not very memorably designed or voiced), but Anxiety (Hawke) is here to challenge Joy for dominance. An orange-hued overachiever who looks like a benchwarmer Muppet and acts like Jessie on that one Saved By the Bell episode where she discovers caffeine pills, Anxiety is convinced of the righteousness of her cause (“I plan for the future” is how she benignly describes her process, the little despot). Soon, Joy and the original team are sent to cool their heels with Riley’s other suppressed thoughts (I won’t spoil the scene’s secrets but it gets closest to the first film’s giddy, anything-goes imaginativeness). From there, the gang must go on a quest to restore balance to Riley.

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because the sequel follows much the same structure as the original as it journeys deeper inside Riley’s head. It arrives at the same epiphanies, too – that shoving uncomfortable feelings away will only stunt our emotional growth, and a happy mind is one that encourages harmony, not a solo artist, among the chorus of emotions. Did I long for the daring of the first film? Its sense of wonder? I did. But new director Kelsey Mann, along with screenwriters Meg LeFauve (who co-wrote the first film) and Dave Holstein, are about expanding the brief of the original, not venturing out in startling new directions. Both Inside Out films provide a language, a framework, for young people to process complex emotions; in particular, I suspect the sequel’s artful evocation of an anxiety attack will be helpful for parents negotiating their own bundles of joy-turned-bundles of nerves. A utility belt kind of film, Inside Out 2 gets the job done, which is exactly as inspiring as it sounds.