The moment when Pixar revealed the first new characters in Inside Out 2Fans of the animation studio began to argue about the basic idea of the film. from the inside to the outside It focuses 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 enters puberty on her 13th birthday and suddenly new emotions take shape in her head: fear, envy, embarrassment and boredom. Fans of the first film had a lot to Questions and complaints: Aren’t these emotions simply smaller versions of the existing? Why are you everything negative? And above all, why were none of these emotions in the first film?
Of all the concerns, the last one seems to be the most justified: from the inside to the outside took the audience into many different heads, but only found the original five emotions. There were many theories about how Inside Out 2 would fix this apparent continuity error. Ultimately, though, the new film doesn’t really address it. And you know what? That’s OK. It’s not a big deal. And it’s certainly not a reason to dismiss a thoughtful, emotionally powerful film. 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 is valid. While the simultaneous arrival of puberty and feelings like anxiety and embarrassment are both a source of humor for the film and an invitation to empathy about how hard it is to be 13, it raises many of the world-building questions that Pixar fans love to gripe about. Once the new film acknowledges anxiety as a separate emotion from fear, with its own problems and its own agenda, it raises many questions.
The largest comes from one of the from the inside to the outsideThe best gags: an end credits montage that plunges into many other people’s heads to see what the balance between the five basic emotions looks like for other people. (Plus a cat and a dog.) Once from the inside to the outside Director Pete Docter has directed the film complicated imagery and symbolismhe uses this kind of insight into other people’s minds to say things about the human experience in quite subtle ways.
In Riley’s head, Joy is in charge, so much so that she loudly resists and rejects any input from Sorrow. But in her mother’s eyes, Sorrow is the leader of the group, running it like a respectful, considerate committee. And Riley’s father is controlled by Anger, a gruff military type who treats all other emotions like lower-ranking officers. Both choices help the audience understand Riley’s parents in a surprisingly intimate way. But mostly, the glimpses into other people’s heads just serve to create quick humor. The fact that we look into so many heads and never see fear there feels odd in retrospect, and spoils the joke about how people are so similar on the inside, yet so different.
Inside Out 2 addresses this discrepancy on a very small scale, with short gags in which adult versions of Anxiety pop out from behind a curtain to address the five primal emotions in the minds of Riley’s parents. These moments – one of which is included in the last trailer of the film – is obviously an afterthought, a “we were here the whole time, you just didn’t notice us” explanation that isn’t particularly convincing considering that any other emotions swirling around in Riley’s head would surely have been at least interrogated during the chaos of the first film. But honestly, it doesn’t really need to be convincing either, because strict, doctrinaire continuity just isn’t important to the Inside Out films.
Both Inside Out films are based on emotional truths, not literal ones. And the emotional truth here is that when Riley is faced with problems she has never faced before – including the enormous hormonal changes of puberty – it feels as if she is not only experiencing brand new emotions, but as if they are taking over. Similar to the magical panda transformations in To reddenthe idea of new emotions emerging is metaphorical and focuses on the experience of becoming a teenager. It’s not a scientific map of the brain. And it’s primarily about Riley’s subjective experience, not the psychoanalysis of the rest of the world.
Director Kelsey Mann and his co-writers (including Inside Out 2 Co-author Meg LeFauve) do not say that adults never feel embarrassment or envy. But they also cannot retrospectively from the inside to the outside to fit their story. This is a purely practical, mechanical problem – it’s inevitable that it will happen in franchises sometimes – rather than a mistake due to carelessness or the new film team not understanding the original. It’s worth taking the creators to task for continuity when they take a popular story and get the tone or characters completely wrong. But criticizing them for not inventing time travel seems beside the point.
Yes, Mann and Co. could have insisted on making a film that only used the characters from the original film – but they would have risked falling into the usual “more of the same, but louder” problem that sequels so often have. Instead, they spoke to psychologists and a ndollarscientist about how puberty affects the brain, and built a story that acknowledged those changes and their feelings. And yes, they could have strived for a resolution where the new emotions eventually merge with the existing ones—anxiety and embarrassment dissolving into fear, boredom into disgust, and envy into sadness—but that wouldn’t necessarily have felt true to the human experience either.
For some people, the new emotions may be a narrative deal-breaker, and that’s OK – adding new characters to a new iteration of an existing story can sometimes be a mercenary decision, a the lazy one or bothso it’s reasonable to be skeptical. Especially for people who suffer from their own anxiety, it can be frustrating when this experience is dismissed as something that doesn’t happen to adults, except in the mildest and most minimal terms.
But rather than listing this break in continuity for a CinemaSins-esque roundup of unforgivable flaws, it’s worth considering everything that goes into it, and how little impact it has on the many meaningful ways in which these two films interact with each other, beyond making a few scattered gags less effective. And it’s also worth considering how well Inside Out 2 is a standalone work that explores the interaction of these new emotions with each other and their significance for Riley’s life and her relationships with other people.
After all, Mad Max creator George Miller believes that strict continuity in the franchise is not as important as telling a compelling story. Why should we do that?
Inside Out 2 is now in theaters.