Inside Out 2 ruins one of Inside Out’s best gags — and it’s no big deal
The moment Pixar revealed the first new characters in Inside Out 2, fans of the animation studio started arguing about the film’s basic conceit. 2015’s Inside Out centered on five characters who represent the basic emotions of an 11-year-old girl named Riley: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. In the sequel, Riley hits puberty on her 13th birthday, and new emotions suddenly take form in her head: Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui. Fans of the first film had a lot of questions and complaints: Aren’t these emotions just minor variants of the existing ones? Why are they all negative? And above all, why weren’t any of these emotionsaround in the first movie?
Of all the concerns, that last one seems most legitimate: Inside Out took viewers inside many different heads, but only found the original five emotions there. There’s been a lot of theorizing about how Inside Out 2 would reconcile that seeming continuity error. In the end, though, the new movie really doesn’t address it. And you know what? It’s fine. It’s not a big deal. And it certainly isn’t a reason to reject a thoughtful, emotionally powerful movie. Here’s why.
[Ed. note: Spoilers for the credits gag in Inside Out and a few small Inside Out 2 jokes ahead.]
The complaint about the new emotions holds water. While the concomitant arrival of puberty and feelings like anxiety and embarrassment is both a source of humor for the movie and an invitation to empathize about how hard it is to be 13, it does bring up a lot of the world-building questions Pixar fans love to gripe about. Once the new movie acknowledges Anxiety as a separate emotion from Fear, with her own problems and her own agendas, it raises a lot of questions.
The biggest one comes from one of Inside Out’s best gags: a closing-credits montage that rushes into many other minds, to see what the balance between the five basic emotions looks like for other people. (Plus a cat and a dog.) Once Inside Out director Pete Docter has established the
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