10 / 10 & 8 / 10
Pixar has made few films as good as Inside Out.
Pete Docter directed the original in 2015. The film is a story about the psychological architecture of a single eleven-year-old girl named Riley, told from inside her head, with five core emotions as the protagonists. The premise sounds impossible to execute. Pixar executed it. The result is a 10/10 that deserved every award it received and several it didn’t.
Nine years later, in 2024, Inside Out 2 arrived. Kelsey Mann directed. Pete Docter executive produced. The sequel is good, but it isn’t as good as the original. The 8/10 is for a film that delivers what audiences asked for without quite matching what the original accomplished. The sequel made one and a half billion dollars at the box office and became the highest-grossing animated film of all time at the time of release.
The commercial success is the largest gap between Inside Out and Inside Out 2. Critical reception was warm. The film deserves the warmth without quite reaching the canonical status its predecessor reached.
Close to perfect is where I land on the original. Five emotions running a girl’s head from a control room is the kind of idea that ought to collapse under its own cleverness, and instead the film got me caring more about a cotton-candy imaginary friend than most live-action dramas get me caring about their leads.
I enjoyed the sequel a lot. It just never gets its hands around my throat the way the first one does.
The Original Premise
Pete Docter built the premise from his own experience watching his daughter Elie change as she entered adolescence. The daughter who had been bright and emotionally open at eight had become quieter and more guarded at eleven.
Docter wanted to explore what was happening inside her head during the transition. The film became the visual literalization of psychological theory about how emotions function as character within consciousness.
The five core emotions are Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. Each is a distinct character running Riley’s mental command center. Each has personality traits that color how Riley experiences the world. Joy is the protagonist among the emotions. Joy considers herself responsible for Riley’s happiness and considers Sadness a problem to be managed instead of an emotion to be valued. The film is the story of Joy learning that Sadness is necessary instead of optional.
The choice of five emotions follows the basic Ekman taxonomy of universal facial expressions.
Paul Ekman identified six universal emotions in his cross-cultural research. Pixar consulted with Ekman and with University of California Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner during development. The choice to drop surprise from the original five was practical instead of theoretical. Surprise was considered too similar to fear in dramatic function. The five remaining emotions provided sufficient narrative variety without redundancy.
The Architecture
The film constructs Riley’s mind as a physical landscape that the emotions can handle.
Headquarters is the command center where the emotions work. Long Term Memory is a vast warehouse of glowing colored spheres that store individual memories. Personality Islands are the major aspects of Riley’s identity, each a literal floating island connected to Headquarters by glowing transit lines. The Train of Thought runs across the landscape carrying mental processes. The Subconscious is a basement holding repressed fears. Imagination Land is a brightly colored creative space.
Abstract Thought is a department where memories are progressively deconstructed into their abstract components.
The architecture is what sets Inside Out apart from other concept films, and it’s the part I admire most as a storyteller. The film shows Riley’s thoughts as physical objects moving through a place with rules. We learn the rules and then watch them generate plot, as Joy and Sadness try to cross the whole mind back to Headquarters after they’re accidentally ejected. Every element the film set up earlier gets used on that trip, and I get a real kick out of watching each one pay off.
For Writers
For a lesson in handling abstract concepts through concrete visual metaphor, look at Inside Out. The film doesn’t lecture the audience about psychology or explain that emotions function as drives within consciousness. It shows emotions as characters and lets the audience figure out the metaphor. The structure of the mind is presented as physical space that obeys consistent rules. The audience learns the rules through observation instead of through exposition. The lesson for writers is that abstract material lands stronger when concretized.
If your story is about something internal, find a way to externalize it.
Inside Out externalizes the entire psychology of an eleven-year-old girl. The externalization makes the psychology accessible to children and emotionally moving for adults. Most films would have told this story through dialogue between Riley and her parents. Inside Out tells the same story through the journey of Joy and Sadness across a literal mental landscape. The concretization is the craft choice that raises the material.
The Voice Cast
Amy Poehler plays Joy. The casting is the central reason the film works. Poehler had been the comic engine of Parks and Recreation. She brings the same relentless optimism to Joy that she brought to Leslie Knope. The character is exhausting in small doses and would have been intolerable as protagonist if the film hadn’t been honest about Joy’s blind spots. Poehler plays both the exhausting optimism and the gradual recognition of its limits. The performance is the foundation the film builds on.
Phyllis Smith plays Sadness. The casting is the second reason the film works. Smith had played Phyllis on The Office. She brought a gentle, slightly defeated quality to that role that translates directly to Sadness. The character is supposed to bring everyone in the room down. Smith plays the character with full commitment to that function without making her unlikeable. The audience understands Joy’s frustration with Sadness while also feeling sympathy for Sadness across the runtime. The dual response is the dramatic content.
Lewis Black plays Anger. The casting is inspired. Black’s stand-up persona is Anger as a character. The casting required no transformation. Black simply showed up and played his existing comedic tone applied to a tiny red emotion in a command center. The result is one of the funniest voice performances in animated cinema.
Bill Hader plays Fear. Mindy Kaling plays Disgust. Both performances are excellent. Both characters function as supporting members of the Headquarters team while Joy and Sadness conduct the main narrative. The five-emotion team works because the casting is uniformly strong. Pixar didn’t save money on voice talent. The investment shows.
The Bing Bong Sequence
The Bing Bong sequence in the original Inside Out is among the most devastating sequences in animated cinema. Bing Bong is Riley’s imaginary friend from early childhood. The character is part elephant, part cat, part dolphin, made of cotton candy. He’s been living in the Long Term Memory area since Riley stopped imagining him. He helps Joy and Sadness on their journey home. He ends the film by sacrificing himself in the Memory Dump, the abyss where forgotten memories go to fade permanently.
The sequence works on multiple levels. The literal level is the emotional sacrifice of a character the audience has come to care about. The metaphorical level is the recognition that growing up requires losing things that mattered when we were younger. Riley doesn’t consciously choose to forget Bing Bong. The forgetting happens because she’s becoming someone who doesn’t have time for imaginary friends. The film makes the audience feel that loss directly. Children in the audience grieve for Bing Bong. Adults in the audience grieve for their own forgotten childhood companions.
The dialogue is brutal in its simplicity. Bing Bong says “Take her to the moon for me, okay?” Joy doesn’t understand at first. Bing Bong stays behind in the Memory Dump while Joy escapes upward. The sequence is the moment Inside Out won its reputation as serious cinema instead of as merely successful children’s entertainment. Pixar had made audiences cry before. Inside Out made audiences cry about the structural reality of forgetting.
This is the sequence that justifies the 10 for me. I think it’s the bravest thing Pixar has put on screen, letting the sweetest character in the film fade away to make a point about growing up, and doing it with one line and no speech. “Take her to the moon for me, okay?” wrecks me.
The Riley Story
The external Riley story runs parallel to the internal emotions story. Riley is eleven years old. Her family has moved from Minnesota to San Francisco. She’s starting at a new school. She’s lost contact with her friends back home. She’s trying to maintain her identity through transition that’s reshaping who she’s becoming. The external story is everything Pete Docter watched his own daughter go through.
The Riley material works because it’s concrete instead of generic. The family moves to a new city with fresh problems. The new house is too small. The new school is academically demanding. Her father is preoccupied with starting his own business. Her mother is trying to maintain emotional connection with a daughter who’s becoming harder to reach. None of these details are generic. The film calibrates all of them for the kind of pressure that produces the psychological crisis the internal story is dramatizing.
The Riley actress is Kaitlyn Dias. The performance is restrained. Riley doesn’t have many lines in the film. The film delivers the character’s emotional content through the internal emotions story. The external Riley scenes are largely silent or minimally verbal. Dias plays the silence with credibility that grounds the fantasy material around it. The combination of restrained external performance and elaborate internal characterization is the structural innovation Inside Out introduced.
Inside Out 2
In 2024, Inside Out 2 arrived. Riley is thirteen. Puberty has hit. New emotions have arrived at Headquarters. The new emotions include Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui. Maya Hawke voices Anxiety, who is the antagonist of the sequel. The film follows Anxiety’s attempt to take over Headquarters and Joy’s attempt to recover Riley’s existing sense of self before Anxiety can permanently reshape it.
The sequel does several things well. The expansion of the emotion roster is logical. Adolescence does introduce new emotional content that childhood didn’t contain. Anxiety as character is well-constructed. Maya Hawke’s performance is the standout of the new cast. The film handles Riley’s transition into competitive hockey with the same specificity that the original applied to her family’s move. The animation is excellent. The visual design of the new emotions matches the original’s aesthetic.
On the debit side, the sequel also does several things less well. The pacing is rushed in places where the original took its time. Anxiety’s arc resolves more mechanically than the Joy and Sadness arc did. Worst of all, nothing in it hits like Bing Bong.
I kept waiting for the moment that would flatten me, and it never came. The sequel is good without ever being devastating, and the first film was both.
On top of that, the sequel overrelies on call-backs to the original. It references Bing Bong. Specific memories from the first film return. It revisits the Personality Islands. The references are competent. They also signal that the sequel is more interested in honoring the original than in establishing its own distinct identity.
The original Inside Out didn’t have a previous film to reference. The freedom of starting fresh produced more original material than the sequel’s responsibility to honor existing material allowed.
For Writers
Sequels that follow innovative originals face a structural challenge, and Inside Out 2 shows it. The original Inside Out had freedom because nothing like it had been done before. The sequel had responsibility because the original had created an audience that expected specific things. The responsibility limits the creative space the sequel can move through. Anxiety as antagonist is logical but predictable. Hockey as setting is specific but constrained. The new emotions are well-designed but work within the structure the original established.
The lesson for writers is that successful original work creates problems for sequels that authors who haven’t yet written the original can’t anticipate. The freedom of writing without precedent is something most authors only have once per series. Use it well the first time. The later works will work within whatever structure the first work created. There’s no way around this. The structure is the price of having had the freedom in the first place.
The Anxiety Character
Maya Hawke’s Anxiety is the best part of Inside Out 2. The character is constructed with the specificity that distinguishes excellent character work from generic emotional categories. Anxiety isn’t simply afraid but constantly preparing for futures that may not happen. She runs scenario simulations. She projects negative outcomes. She manages risk by anticipating every possible failure. The character is useful in moderate doses but becomes destructive when she’s full control of Riley’s responses.
Hawke plays the character with restless energy that the animation amplifies.
Anxiety never stops moving. Anxiety never stops talking. Anxiety processes new information faster than the other emotions can respond. The performance and the animation work together to give the audience the experience of how anxiety feels from inside. Audiences who have lived with anxiety recognize the character. Audiences who haven’t learn something useful about what their anxious friends are dealing with.
The character is also not vilified. The film makes clear that Anxiety belongs at Headquarters. Anxiety has work to do. The problem isn’t that Anxiety exists but that she has tried to do all the work alone, without input from the other emotions. The resolution is integration instead of expulsion. The film treats anxiety as a normal part of adolescent psychology that requires management instead of as a pathology that requires elimination. The framing is healthy and uncommon in popular culture treatment of anxiety.
Hawke is the reason the sequel gets an 8 from me. Every scene she’s in has a jittery energy the rest of the film can’t match, and I think the choice to fold Anxiety back into the team at the end, instead of throwing her out of Headquarters, is the smartest call the sequel makes.
The Hockey Sequence
The third act hockey tournament is the structural climax of Inside Out 2.
Riley is trying to make a high school hockey team. Anxiety is running her responses. The combination is sabotaging her actual performance. The film cuts between the external hockey game and the internal Headquarters crisis. Both are running on parallel tracks. The resolution of the internal crisis produces the resolution of the external game.
Mechanically, the sequence works. The structural cross-cutting between internal and external worlds is the technique the original Inside Out perfected. The sequel applies the technique with competence. The hockey choreography is well-animated. The Headquarters crisis is well-paced. The two narratives resolve in coordination that matches what the original had accomplished at its similar climactic moments.
What the sequence doesn’t quite reach is the emotional weight the original achieved. The original’s climax was internal. Riley running away from home was the external manifestation. Joy’s recognition of Sadness’s value generated the emotional content. The sequel’s climax is external. The hockey game produces the emotional release. The internal Anxiety crisis is the cause instead of the substance of the resolution. The structural choice produces a less devastating climax even though the technique is comparable.
What Pixar Got Right
Pixar got the emotional honesty right in both films.
The studio refused to soften the difficult material. Bing Bong dies. Riley nearly runs away from home. The Anxiety crisis is painful. The films treat children as audiences capable of processing real emotional content instead of as audiences requiring relentless cheerfulness. The choice generates the loyalty Pixar’s audience shows across the studio’s catalog.
Pixar also got the consulting right. Both films consulted with practicing psychologists during development. The internal architecture of the mind isn’t arbitrary. The emotions aren’t constructed by animators guessing at psychological theory. The films are grounded in actual research about how adolescent psychology functions. The grounding gives the films credibility that purely fanciful concept work can’t achieve.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The original Inside Out shows the value of taking a difficult concept entirely seriously instead of diluting it for the assumed audience. Pixar could have made a simpler film about an eleven-year-old girl with cartoon emotions in her head. The studio chose instead to make a film about how human consciousness functions, presented through visual metaphor that children could follow and that adults could recognize. The decision required research consultation, psychological grounding, structural commitment to consistent rules, and writing that respected both audiences at the same time.
The result was a film that grossed eight hundred fifty million dollars while also generating serious critical analysis from psychology professors.
The dual achievement wasn’t accidental but the consequence of treating the material seriously. The sequel benefits from the foundation the original established but can’t reach the same level of innovation because the structure has already been built. The lesson for writers is that the most ambitious version of any concept is often the most commercially viable version as well.
Audiences respond to material that respects them. Material that talks down to them generates less loyalty even when the talking-down is intended to make the work more accessible. Inside Out talked up to its audience. The audience showed up in commercial numbers that talking-down films routinely fail to reach.
Is Inside Out (2015) and Inside Out 2 as good as people say?
The original Inside Out is a 10/10. The film ranks with the best things Pixar has ever made and the best animated films of the previous twenty years. Pete Docter and his team translated abstract psychological material into concrete visual narrative without diluting either the abstraction or the narrative. The voice cast is excellent across all five emotion roles. The Bing Bong sequence is among the most devastating moments in animated cinema.
The film works at the same time as children’s entertainment, as adult drama, and as accessible introduction to psychological theory. Few films accomplish any one of those goals. Inside Out accomplishes all three at the same time.
My score for Inside Out 2 is an 8/10. The film delivers what audiences asked for without quite matching what the original accomplished. Maya Hawke’s Anxiety is excellent. The expansion of the emotion roster is logical. The animation is uniformly strong. The film doesn’t have a Bing Bong sequence equivalent. It works inside the structure the original established instead of expanding the structure further. The sequel made one and a half billion dollars. The commercial success indicates that audiences responded warmly.
The box office doesn’t change my ranking. The original gets a 10 because it made me laugh at Lewis Black, grieve for an imaginary friend and think harder about sadness than most adult dramas manage, all in the same film. The sequel gets an 8 because it’s funny, well made and carried by Maya Hawke, and because it never once risks breaking my heart the way the first film does on purpose. See the original first, and see the sequel once.
