Pixar’s track record with sequels is mixed. Sometimes, as with all three Toy Story sequels, they beautifully expand upon what came before, diving deeper on emotions and building out unique worlds. Other times, as with both Cars sequels, they feel like weak IP-driven cash grabs. 

Inside Out 2 lands awkwardly in the middle of the two. Following in the footsteps of the 2015 original, Inside Out 2 offers audiences big ideas about the inner workings or our minds, or more specifically 13 year old Riley’s (Kensington Tallman) mind. An opening hockey sequence shows the status quo achieved in the first film, as all five of Riley’s emotions work together to make her succeed. 

It also allows Joy (Amy Poehler) to recap the rather complex system established in Inside Out in a “last time on” that’s not exactly smooth, but also doesn’t grate. The exposition drop works in part because it’s not only looking backwards, but also establishes a key new idea: that Riley’s core memories form beliefs, which in turn form her sense of self. We’re also introduced to a machine Joy built that literally sends bad memories to the back of Riley’s mind; for those “let’s not think about that right now” memories. 

Of course all of this is established so that it can be thrown into chaos. 

The night before Riley is set to attend a three day hockey camp with her two best friends from middle school and some kids she’ll be attending high school with next year, a puberty alarm goes off. Her emotions abruptly wake up and Joy tosses the alarm into her back of the mind machine, but there’s no avoiding the coming changes. Their headquarters are expanded and five new emotions are introduced, key among them: Anxiety (Maya Hawke). 

It’s fairly easy to guess how things play out from here: Anxiety takes control, changes the way Riley acts, problems arise, and a new equilibrium is established. Which isn’t all that different from the way the Inside Out plays out, leading to a movie that feels narratively repetitive. And not only of Inside Out, but of many of Pixar and other studios’ children’s films about self-actualization. 

The too familiar narrative holds Inside Out 2 as a whole from achieving the brilliance of some of its individual moments. Throughout the movie there are scenes, images, and jokes that land fantastically, but they never coalesce into something great. 

The opening hockey sequence offers exciting and well choreographed sports action, highlighting a focus on how people and spaces interact that shows up in some hilarious slapstick bits later on. The inclusion of characters from Riley’s pop culture interests allow the Pixar house style characters and world to interact with some brightly colored two dimensional cartoon characters and a pixelated video game character. At one point a plan is visualized using paper animation. Beautiful blue neon tendrils emerge from a pool littered with colored floating memory orbs to form Riley’s sense of self. A “brainstorm” (one of many puns along with “sar-chasm” and literal “suppressed emotions”) also looks stunning, with a glowing dark green tornado filling the screen with swirls of more of the all-important memory orbs. 

Inside Out 2 is an enjoyable, funny, and sometimes emotionally impactful film. But it fails to stand among Pixar’s best films because it’s too derivative of those films; and many others.