Disney Pixar’s Inside Out 2 became the biggest movie of 2024, making over a billion dollars at the box office, yet it is also this year’s worst movie. Inside Out 2 lacks the fun, campy badness of a Madame Web, instead clinging to sincerity the whole runtime. This sincerity should be charming and refreshing in a kids movie, but the movie remains incredibly contrived from conception through release. It constitutes the next step in Disney and the other major studios’ path to nearly exclusively release sequels and nostalgia bait, and this one happened to hit big. I like sequels and nostalgia bait as much as the next person—I still watch every MCU movie in theaters— but I try to recognize them for their true nature: slop. Unlike many blockbusters that contentedly dish out slop onto each audience member’s figurative plate like a lunch lady, Inside Out 2 instead chooses to intubate the audience. It has no confidence that the audience will pick up on its ideas, so it makes them exactly the same as the plot—a none too complex plot, either.
The movie follows 13-year-old Riley as she struggles with her emotions preparing to enter high school. She attends a hockey camp where she meets cool, older girls who she wants to spend time with instead of her dorky friends, but do not worry, Riley will come to love her dorky friends by the end! The movie dually follows the literal emotions inside Riley’s head—Anger, Joy, Sadness, Disgust, and Fear—as they run into trouble handling the new emotions that just arrived in Riley’s head—Anxiety, Embarrassment, Ennui, and Envy. The dual narrative presents interesting concepts, theoretically working to raise the stakes as the emotions contribute to the bad decisions in Riley’s plot. In reality, the audience’s brains shut off as the movie preaches the importance of learning to live with anxiety as the emotions literally learn to live with the character Anxiety. Apart from the spoonfed delivery, the movie’s focus on messaging misunderstands what makes a great kids’ movie. We do not remember Cinderella because of how sensitively it portrays the shame of being poor around rich people; we remember Cinderella because it made us feel like princesses. Look at the legendary work of Studio Ghibli as another example. Sure, My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away wrestle with big ideas but only after they ensure that moments will live forever in the emotional and sensory memory of the audience.
Outside of the concept issues, Inside Out 2 flops in its execution. A movie that takes the difficulty of being a middle schooler and not understanding your emotions seriously could have real utility for its intended audience. As my younger sister would love to tell you, being in middle school sucks. Thus, Inside Out 2 immediately loses the thread when it dips into staid clichés about 15 minutes in when Riley yells, “GET OUT OF MY ROOM, MOM!” Sitting through this middle school therapy session disguised as a movie becomes incredibly difficult when it can only muster the sensitivity of your least funny relative.
Furthermore, the images offer no reprieve from the rest of the movie’s onslaught of insult. Inside Out 2 merely happens to be the next movie to have boring, tired CGI animation. The vibrant colors should be nice, but the movie’s inability to express anything without showing all of its work transmogrifies the colors themselves into an elementary lesson in color theory. Red is for anger. Blue is for sadness, and so on. Finally and fittingly, Inside Out 2’s greatest dip into visual spectacle features emotions and ideas trapped within colorful marbles that represent memories, cascading down towards Riley’s sense of self, possibly about to alter it—a potent representation of what a movie can do—yet the characters start running from the avalanche of memory orbs and nearly drown trying to ride it. I wanted to like Inside Out 2, but just as its characters run from emotions and memories, it sprints away from instilling emotions and memories in the audience, instead opting for a simplistic and didactic lecture.
Rating: INDY
Hudson Witte is an undecided freshman in the College. He swears he likes movies.
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