I've seen a lot of kids’ movie slop in the last three years and I’m happy to report Inside Out 2 (2024) was not the worst, despite everything I’ve written below. Inside Out (2015) was lauded as a breakthrough in kids’ media: there was no villain and no romantic subplot! The story centered the interiority of a young girl experiencing the joy and grief of growing up! I liked Inside Out. It was poignant, funny, and clever.
Inside Out 2 deviates little from its predecessor, aside from introducing some new emotions (anxiety, ennui, embarrassment) and concepts (sense of self, core beliefs), and thus felt less fresh than the original. Additionally, I watched the sequel sitting next to my nearly four-year-old daughter, which as usual caused me to see the film through the eyes of someone much younger and more impressionable.
During the film, I couldn’t stop thinking that Inside Out 2 is doing a disservice to the fundamental experience of understanding the self. The questions Riley must answer in the film (Who am I? What do I believe about myself? Why do I feel or act the way I do?) are, at the expense of sounding grandiose, some of the great existential questions. These are questions people have been trying for millennia to answer via literature, art, philosophy, and religion.
Preschoolers in particular cannot help but mingle mundane and esoteric curiosity by asking a barrage of Important Questions. (How do toilets work? Why do dogs poop outside? Why do dogs kick grass on their poop? What does “etcetera” mean? Do sharks eat whales? What is the tallest animal? What is the biggest, biggest most fattest animal in the entire world? Why do you have to go to work? What happens when we die?) Some of these questions are ripe for little Educational Moments, while others are simply not amenable to a trite ChatGPT answer and leave me questioning my own understanding of the world. Herein lies my issue with the Inside Out franchise, which takes these foundational questions of existence and flattens them into discrete, legible representations.
In the films, Riley’s emotions are tiny corporate avatars with thick procedure manuals and a big white minimalist console of buttons and levers. Riley’s memories are glowing glass orbs, tinted the color of the emotions experienced as the memories were made. (Of course the emotions all have distinct colors and character designs, to aid us in clearly understanding what is anger versus sadness.) The most important memory orbs are set to float in a dark pool where they grow long stems that conjoin with other stems into a glassy sculptural artifact called “sense of self” which emits little sound bytes of positive or negative self-affirmation. This is a cute set up, but it’s also disgustingly trite. Where is the mystery? Where is the surreal? Where is the unfathomable complexity of consciousness that somehow arises simply from electric signals in a juicy mass of cells???
Actual footage of Pixar trying to explain the mystery of consciousness to a preschooler
The best parts of Inside Out 2 are in fact throwaway gags: Riley’s brain playing a commercial jingle at the most inopportune times, her mortifying crush on a cringey video game character. These allusions to the bizarre and inexplicable parts of existence felt much more resonant than the tidy lessons about how all emotions should get a turn at being in charge of the brain console.
As the credits rolled after Inside Out 2, I heard a tween behind me read aloud “child psychologist?” and the kid’s mom respond, smugly, “yes, of course they hired a psychologist.” This made me even more annoyed! And I say this as someone who holds psychological research in high regard! In the history of human epistemology, Western science is a relative newcomer. Only in the past century have we begun to posit research-backed answers to these questions about our minds. Even a psychology undergrad would surely recognize the lack of scientific consensus on many, if not most, psychological phenomena. The idea of feeding anyone’s child, let alone my child, a pastiche of Disney/corporate America/Psychology Today-derived concepts about what is going on in her head makes me feel very uneasy.
Look, I’m not actually trying to insinuate a moral panic about a kids’ movie. Not trying to start a boycott. If some child sees Inside Out 2 and it helps them have more empathy for themselves or for others, that’s hardly something I can criticize. Better that than whatever they might have learned from Wish (2024) (cursed by navel-gazing Disney nostalgia and possibly AI) or Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie (2023) (cursed by the Kardashians and copaganda). I just hope that the Inside Out franchise, rather than dominating a young generations’ emerging theory of mind, can at least be integrated with other frameworks dervied from other non-Disney sources. Which is why I will be taking my daughter to see the re-release of Coraline (2009) in a couple of weeks and cleansing both our souls with some button-eyed stop-motion.