Inside Out 2 revives the old Pixar magic

polygon.com:

The problem with iterating on a movie as perfectly complete as Pete Docter’s 2015 Pixar feature Inside Out is that a neatly closed narrative loop doesn’t leave a lot of obvious next steps for the story. Inside Out is half a world-building exercise in establishing an elaborate visual metaphor and testing its flexibility, half a coming-of-age story about an 11-year-old navigating a big life change. But its real point is confirming to the audience that sadness — an element that’s core to Pixar’s best movies — isn’t just an inescapable part of life, it has an important purpose. So what’s left for a sequel? Reiterating that sadness still isn’t all bad? Moving down the list of characters to express the importance of anger and fear?

Inside Out 2’s initial trailers suggested that the answer was “introduce a whole lot of new characters,” a historically risky gambit that seemed likely to complicate the setting without necessarily adding anything it needed. And with Docter not leading the project, all the usual questions about whether the original movie needed a sequel were compounded by reasonable concerns over whether a new director would really get what makes Inside Out one of Pixar’s most touching and memorable features.

But Inside Out 2 doesn’t fall into the usual sequel traps of piling on more of the same thing the original was doing, just bigger, louder, and with extra emphasis on whatever fans loved most vocally the first time out. It authentically forwards the story of Inside Out’s Riley Andersen, giving her new problems to face both internally and externally, and finding clever ways to expand the innovative metaphorical language from the original movie.

There are new emotions, new mental-landscape puns, and new parts of Riley’s head to explore, but the most important element is that her story feels believable — not just on the fantasy level, but as a moving and occasionally heartbreaking narrative about being a teenager. Director Kelsey Mann (Onward writer and Party