The story is based around a world where our basic emotions are personified by characters that excel in those emotions, so you have Sadness (voiced by Phyllis Smith), Fear (Tony Hale), Disgust (Liza Lapira), Anger (Lewis Black) and Joy (Amy Poehler) who has the hardest job of all reigning in all these potentially destructive emotions. Now it wouldn’t be a relevant story without the addition of some new emotions and characters that mirror our times.

Mirroring real life, anxiety (Maya Hawke) joins the party and really throws a monkey wrench into the proceedings as does embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) envy (Ayo Edebiri) and last but certainly not least ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos). These new emotions add to the war raging inside young Riley Andersen’s (Kensington Tallman) head. Riley is at that stage in life where those emotions can develop their strongest grip, the early teen years.

Even though Riley comes from a stable loving family she still falls prey to those conflicting and contradictory emotions. The film’s journey is about her finding the strength to put those wildly ranging emotions in check. This is done with consummate filmmaking skill and falls right into Pixar’s wheelhouse of amazing visuals and strong storyline ethics. If only life’s hard lessons could be this much fun in real life.
Rob Hudson
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Maya Hawke voices Anxiety, the previously announced new arrival bound to shake up everything in headquarters and beyond. A bundle of frazzled energy, Anxiety enthusiastically ensures Riley’s prepared for every possible negative outcome.

Envy, voice of Ayo Edebiri, may be small but she sure knows what she wants. She’s perpetually jealous of everything everyone else has, and she’s not afraid to pine over it.

Ennui, who’s voiced by Adèle Exarchopoulos, couldn’t care less. Bored and lethargic with a well-practiced eye-roll, Ennui adds the perfect amount of teenage apathy to Riley’s personality, when she feels like it.

Embarrassment, voiced by Paul Walter Hauser, likes to lay low, which isn’t easy for this burly guy with a bright blush-pink complexion.

Additionally, Kensington Tallman lends her voice to Riley Andersen, who’s about to begin high school. Lilimar was called on to voice Valentina “Val” Ortiz, a high school hockey player who everyone, including Riley and her friends, looks up to. Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan return to voice Riley’s mum and dad; Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green and Grace Lu provide the voices for Riley’s besties; and Yvette Nicole Brown voices Coach Roberts, who heads up a summer hockey camp. The voice cast also includes Sarayu Blue, Flea, Ron Funches, Dave Goelz, James Austin Johnson, Bobby Moynihan, Frank Oz, Paula Pell, Paula Poundstone, John Ratzenberger, Kendall Coyne Schofield, June Squibb, Kirk Thatcher and Yong Yea
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According to director Kelsey Mann, the new character promises to stir things up within headquarters. “Anxiety, voiced by Maya Hawke, might be new to the crew, but she’s not really the type to take a back seat,” said Mann.

“That makes a lot of sense if you think about it in terms of what goes on inside all our minds.” A trailer is now available for what promises to be the feel-good (or feel-everything) film of Winter 2024.

Disney and Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” returns to the mind of newly minted teenager Riley just as headquarters is undergoing a sudden demolition to make room for something entirely unexpected: new Emotions! Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, who’ve long been running a successful operation by all accounts, aren’t sure how to feel when Anxiety shows up.

And it looks like she’s not alone. Maya Hawke lends her voice to Anxiety, alongside Amy Poehler as Joy, Phyllis Smith as Sadness, Lewis Black as Anger, Tony Hale as Fear, and Liza Lapira as Disgust. Directed by Kelsey Mann and produced by Mark Nielsen, “Inside Out 2” releases only in cinemas Winter 2024.
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It’s no surprise that Disney is promoting Inside Out on the back of Up as (aside from the directorial connection) it is the Pixar film that is most similar to date. Both films employ very adult themes packaged in an easily digestible kiddie format.

The film beautifully visualises the thought processes and memory structures of the human mind, distilling human emotions to five fundamentals – joy, sadness, anger, disgust and fear – and represents these as little people conflicting inside our heads, battling for control of any given situation. It all feels very true to tone and our ability to relate to these conflicting emotions crucially beguiles us to the films protagonist: 11 year-old girl, Riley.

When Riley’s family is uprooted from Minnesota to San Francisco, her difficulty in coping with this change creates internal emotional conflicts. With Joy and Sadness missing in action, Riley is left to negotiate her new circumstance with only fear, anger and disgust at her disposal. Predictably, this doesn’t go well, and we follow the adventures of Joy and Sadness as they attempt to return to Riley’s ‘control room’ and stabilise her emotional rollercoaster.

The style of the visuals and storytelling is heavily flavoured by the likes of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz and some sequences are suitably downright trippy and dreamlike.

But despite all the cutesy animation and funny hijinks, as an adult viewer, there’s no escaping the major theme here of an 11 year-old girl whose bout of sadness thrusts her into depression and potential homelessness. It’s a heady theme indeed, especially for a kid’s film, but fear not, a happy ending awaits you at the film’s conclusion so you do get to go home feeling good about it. Thankfully the kids just go along for the funny ride and are spared the emotional trauma suffered by mum and dad.

Inside Out is set to stake out a very special place in children’s literature. It’s a film squarely targeted at kids but it doesn’t shy away from the hard realities of life. It shares the shelf with Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are and Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing as stories that will mature in a child’s eyes as they grow older. This is no small achievement and as such Pixar have created something very rare indeed. I very much look forward to seeing my eight year-old watch this movie in the decades to come and to experience her gradual realisation as to what this story is really about. I hope (and expect) it mirrors my own experience with Sendak’s masterwork.

As a side note, the preceding short, Lava, is one of Pixar’s lesser efforts – it’s kind of creepy, actually, though I expect it’s rooted in Polynesian mythology – but thankfully this is in no way forecasts the quality of the following feature.

Stuart Jamieson
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