Quick synopsis: Riley is now a teenager, and with increased age comes increase emotion.

With Pixar, you know what you’re getting; emotions. They’ve given emotions to a wide variety of things: toys, dinosaurs, Scottish people. Inside Out is the most obvious example of this: What if emotions had emotions? It wasn’t crying out for a sequel, it was pretty self-contained and didn’t leave any unanswered questions. That doesn’t mean a sequel doesn’t make sense. It was a film about childhood emotions, and (spoilers), emotions don’t stop when people hit their teens.

Let’s be honest, even if it didn’t NEED a sequel, it’s very easy to picture how to do one. As people grow, their emotions develop and become more complex. It’s the complexity of developing emotions that drives the plot of Inside Out 2 (IO2, pronounced Eye-owe-two, like the surname of a lower league Ghanaian footballer). As well as the returning Sadness, Joy, Disgust (sadly no longer voiced by Mindy Kaling over a pay dispute), Anger and Fear, there are also new emotions in the form of Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui. Three of them slot effortlessly and are believable (albeit incredibly late arriving, are you saying other people didn’t have anxiety until they were teens? Lucky bastards), Ennui feels the most out of place and unnecessary.

The main difference in this entry is the importance placed on Sense Of Self. At first, it just seems like a clever way of displaying something, but the pay-off when Riley is affected by self-doubt, and how it affects her sense of self, is f*cking marvellous and one of the best things I’ve seen this year. It’s a perfect encapsulation of how you can crippled by anxiety and worries, and how they can lead to you keep making things worse in an attempt to make them better.

IO2 actually does a pretty good job of explaining the benefits of anxiety; preparing you for things which have not yet come to be (a bit like that super scary thing in The Muppet Christmas Carol). On the downside, that does mean that Joys arc of “oh, I see that negative emotions value now, I should help them and ease them into this system” is very similar to her arc in the first movie. I know there will be some narrative crossover, but there are times where it does feel like we’re just watching the same thing again.

That’s a very small issue though, overall it’s delightful, in a kind of depressing way. This, like all Pixar films, will break you slightly. But it will also rebuild you. That’s what Pixar do, they make you sad, but then they leave you feeling inspired and hopefull. They’re masters at it, and nobody does it better, except for Carly Simon.

Fun fact btw: When I left the cinema after seeing this I overheard a small child say it wasn’t very realistic because “why would someone’s brain make them feel worse?”. That poor sweet innocent child.